


Step Into The Sun

by lizzyb261



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: #givethirteenabreak2020, F/F, F/M, Minor The Doctor | Theta Sigma/The Master | Koschei (Doctor Who: Academy Era), Telepathy, They need hugs, Thoschei, all the thasmin is just fluff, also at some point it kind of devolves into a mild crackfic, angsty, i spent the entire time writing this listening to words fail by ben platt, it's either hardcore thasmin fluff or hardcore thoschei angst, just two sad ppl, no in between, suicide talk tw, thasmin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 41,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23355361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzyb261/pseuds/lizzyb261
Summary: after the end of season 12 when thirteen's stuck in a judoon prison cell, she gets a message from her best enemy and her past starts catching up to her.
Relationships: Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan, Yasmin Khan & The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 99





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i have been absolutely fizzing with thoschei for the past three months, and i had writer's block for ages, so here's a bunch of stuff that i wrote because sacha dhawan is incredible and jodie whittaker is awesome, and also because i'm stuck at home and have nothing else to do. tell me what you think of it in the comments! :)

The cold, dull floor had become depressingly familiar to the Doctor. She had languished away in the Judoon’s prison for what felt like aeons. There was no sense of time. The one thing she had, the Timeless Child, it was supposed to be _her thing_. For everything that had been stripped away from her, at least she had who she was. Who she had been. Actually, she didn’t even have that. She was nothing. A shell. A husk. A shadow of all the people she’d been, of all the stories she’d forgotten. 

Her entire body hurt. It was too cold. She was constantly slipping between states of consciousness, and she could barely think. Her entire brain was buzzing, like a lazy fly was ambling around her head and messing with her train of thought. She could barely feel the pain. It was just cold enough to make her shiver and feel sick, but not cold enough to make her die. How unfortunate. 

She couldn’t tell when it was day, when it was night, when it was this week or last week. There was some telepathic filter that they had put up so that she couldn’t know. It was terrible, not knowing. She hated it. There was a tiny window, a bit smaller than her face, covered in bars which were themselves covered in tiny spikes that were too small to see. Not too small to cut. She’d found that out the hard way. The scars had stayed there for a while. A few weeks, maybe. She considered using them to cut herself and see how long they would heal just as a way to tell the time. If nothing else, at least this body could bleed. 

The window was where she spent most of her time. It was a bit higher than her face, which made her long for her previous incarnation where she wouldn’t ever have to be on tippy-toes. She couldn’t even tell which nebula they were in. She could _feel it_ , right there on the tip of her tongue, but the prison cell was apparently designed so she had no sense of time or space. And that was all she was, really. Just a traveller. But she had stopped travelling. She couldn’t get out, or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she was staying in this cell without any attempt to escape because… No. Don’t think about that. 

The Doctor slumped down on the ground, her hair greasy and unkempt, her head drooping onto her knees. She couldn’t feel her fingertips. Or her toes, actually. Her mouth felt dry. It was so cold. She couldn’t remember what the thirteenth digit of pi was. Three point one four one five nine two six five… five? Maybe it was three. Her gaze was empty, unfocused, and she didn’t register a small purple drone slipping in through the bars on her window. Nor did she notice a small greek symbol etched into it: a circle with a line dashed through the middle. _Theta_. 

“I’m on my way, love.” 

The Doctor snapped to life, her dazed mind scrabbling to find the source of the voice. Her eyes landed on the drone, and the symbol on it, and her pallor turned an even starker white than it had been before. _No, no, no, he can’t be back, he can’t have survived… Can he?_ She knew what he was capable of. Death had never been a particularly effective constraint on his plans to ruin the lives of everyone he thought would cause her pain if they died. But.. she thought…

She had mourned him, in a way. He was her best friend. And best enemy. He was all she remembered, and he had destroyed the planet that had destroyed her. She… she thought she loved him, at one point. By now, it was more than love, and more than hatred. It was more than any words in any language could ever hope to encompass, even theirs. Each was entwined in the essence of the other. She had grieved for him, but she had accepted that he was gone. That he couldn’t kill anyone else. That maybe the universe was a safer place without him. Maybe the universe was a safer place without both of them. 

The Doctor’s eyes fluttered and her eyes went back into focus, a consequential groan rumbling at the base of her throat. She crawled forwards, unable to muster the energy to stand, and checked the drone to see if it was a bomb. It wouldn’t be out of character. Trying to kill one another was like a coping mechanism for the two of them. Her fingers fumbled with the machine, her tired eyes scanning it for anything suspicious. Her fingers inadvertently traced over her name. She hadn’t been Theta Sigma in a long time. She’d almost forgotten the sound of it. She didn’t bother trying to say it, though. Her throat was dry from severe malnutrition and dehydration. It had nothing to do with the fact that it always sounded better when he said it. Nothing at all. 

The heels of his shoes clicked along the corridor made her tense up immediately. Nobody had opened her door since she’d gotten here. They knew what she was, or at least they thought they did. If she starved, she would just be reborn again. How bitterly true it was. 

The Doctor heard beeping on the other side of the door. It was thick and grey, made of something that looked a bit like concrete but was definitely a lot stronger. She hadn’t bothered trying to figure out how to escape. Prisons were like sponges for hope. Absorbing all of it until there was nothing left. There was a final click, and the door opened. Light gushed in. She hadn’t realised how dark the cell was until she was able to see outside. It was too bright. The Doctor shielded her face from him as he walked in, an obvious spring in his step. 

“Hello, love. How’ve you been? Dying without me, I hope.” His voice sent a shiver up her spine. She couldn’t speak. It felt like her throat was being strangled. The Master bent down to where she was huddled miserably on the floor and bored into her eyes. A question. _Are you okay?_ She shook her head soundlessly. Something in his eyes hardened ever so slightly. 

“How did you survive? How are you even here? You can’t do that,” she said, her voice weak. 

The Master ignored her. “Come on! Lots to do, you know the drill,” he barked suddenly, making the Doctor recoil. “Get up.” 

She tried, but she stumbled and fell back down. He huffed in frustration and grabbed her body. Not roughly, but not gently, either. He tugged her up until she was half-standing, and then he did something quickly so that she was in his arms. She couldn’t tell what it was, he’d done it so fast. Her head felt dizzy. She closed her eyes, and allowed her head to rest against his shoulder. She fell asleep as she listened to the thrum of his heartbeats. She didn’t see how the Master looked at her with something akin to tenderness, or sense how he readjusted himself a bit so she was more comfortable. She didn’t see how, when he carried her to his TARDIS and placed her gently on his bed, he tucked her hair behind her ear and placed a soft kiss on her forehead before going to get a cup of water to place on the bedside table. That was the sad thing about Time Lords, though. They never seemed to stop allowing themselves to suffer. Perhaps it was in their nature. 

~~~

The Master hadn’t meant to rescue her. He had been forgetting his woes out in a Prydonian pub in the 76th century, and he’d heard something. Whispers. Whispers about the Doctor, to be specific. And even he would admit to being interested in that. They said she was rotting away in a Judoon prison, wanted for murder. He’d laughed at that. She would definitely deny it, he was certain. He just had a niggling urge to show up and laugh in her face. Say something clever. And then probably leave. So he send a drone, with a little message set up. But when he had gone into that grimy prison, full to the brim with Judoon who had no idea what they were really keeping. Moronic, mindless creatures who could barely comprehend anything more than one of the Doctor’s measly humans (and everyone knew how he felt about them). So the Master had… well. The Doctor had been too unconscious to see the carnage around her as he sidestepped the bodies. He had taken a few minutes longer than he had planned. He just wanted to see her, and make her hurt, if she wasn’t already hurting. But when he had seen the prison, his TARDIS floating right outside her window with a perception filter on, he could see how dark and small and dank and pitiful it was. He felt almost legally required to help her. He couldn’t bring himself to just leave her there. It brought up a dark sensation in his gut, something he hadn’t felt as much since he had annihilated Gallifrey. 

But it served them right. Nobody had the right to imprison a Time Lord, let alone her. And once he had seen it, seen her tear-streaked face in that tiny cell devoid of light, covered in dirt, dust and blood, he knew that he wouldn’t ever regret it. He had killed them silently, though, using a silent bomb that would incinerate any Judoon patrolling the prison, killing them quietly and quickly. The inmates would probably die. He couldn’t find it in him to care, as long as she was safe. She was all that he cared about. He thought of the woman in his bedroom looking half-dead, dreaming of all the people he’d killed. Something inside him twisted. He trudged into the living room, one of the few personalised rooms he had in the TARDIS besides his bedroom and the kitchen. There were two armchairs, a fireplace, and a liquor cabinet. He sat down in the large purple armchair, a glass of whiskey in his hand, and stared at the fireplace. Waiting.

~~~

The Doctor groaned as she came to with a sharp pain in her head, images of fire flashing in her mind. She couldn’t remember much, but it was coming to her in pieces. Her hand curled against the… pillow? She opened her eyes, closing them back again and wincing at the brightness. It wasn’t even that bright, just a candle on the table next to her, but it was enough to give her a headache. She remembered the Master- the Doctor opened her eyes again with a start, swivelling her head around to scan her surroundings for him. No. She shouldn’t have been here. She couldn’t be here. Her head hurt again, and she rubbed her face with her hands. They came back dirty and covered in grime. She frowned. Her face probably wasn’t any cleaner. She checked the room for any cameras or anything that could be a life-threatening booby trap and came up with nothing. There was a glass of something on the table, though. The Doctor picked it up gingerly and sniffed it. It didn’t smell like anything. Vodka? It wasn’t chloroform, otherwise she’d be unconscious. It was almost certainly spiked with something, though, but she was… she was the Timeless Child. They both knew that. The worst-case scenario was she got a new face. And anyway, her throat stung like it had been lathered in sandpaper. She took a swig of the drink, and waited for something to happen. It didn’t taste like anything. Maybe her nerves would be paralysed? She’d never died like that before. The Doctor drummed her fingers on the thick blanket and looked around. There was a bookcase, filled with all sorts of things. Dozens of languages. Some were even in Gallifreyan. Her eyes raked across the shelves with hunger. It was only then that she realised that she wasn’t paralysed, and that her bone marrow didn’t seem to be disintegrating. She frowned again and picked up the glass. Perhaps it was just… water. It was oddly kind of the Master to leave water there. She took another tentative sip. Nope. Still no disastrous consequences. Well, if it was a slow-acting poison, she would take a look around while she was still conscious. The Doctor swung her legs to the side of the bed and tried standing up. She wobbled a bit, but she managed it. So she took one last gulp of the possibly-not-poison and exited what she assumed was the Master’s bedroom. Her nose wrinkled at that. 

The Doctor ambled along a long corridor to the TARDIS console. It still looked similar to that day in the Australian outback. It felt like lifetimes ago. She missed the peace of O’s house. He was just her friend, just a human, and nothing more. She missed him. 

The Doctor considered her options. If she wanted, she could easily travel back to where she’d left the TARDIS. But that would mean leaving the Master, and it would mean that she wouldn’t get any answers. She needed answers. There had to be a reason for him taking her away. Maybe he was the reason she was left there in the first place? She didn’t know. But she needed answers. The Doctor shook her head in frustration and stormed out of the console room, marching back down the corridor. She tried to persuade the TARDIS to show her to him. It wouldn’t budge. She gave it a few compliments, buttered it up and tried again. This time, it seemed like it might consider the option. _If you show me to him, I’ll never bother you again_ , the Doctor tried as a last resort. The TARDIS made a sound like a laugh, and another corridor appeared. _Thank you_. 

She strode through the corridor, to what seemed to be a sparsely furnished living room. He was there, sitting in an armchair and drinking something the colour of amber. She fixed him with an intense glare. He looked at her with something unreadable in his eyes, and gestured to another armchair. She sat in it stiffly, shifting her gaze to the fireplace. For a long moment, they both stared at the embers curling around themselves, dying and relighting, always moving, never still. 

The Master breaks the silence first. “Sleep well?” He asks. 

“No,” she replies. “What was in the cup?”

“Water.” He laughs without a trace of humour detectable in his voice. “Though you’d be parched.”

She was, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She raised her eyes to him, finally. He was already looking at her. “Why did you bring me here?” Her voice was accusatory. 

The Master raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, love, thought you’d be a bit more pleased than that to be out of prison.” She noticed how he avoided the question. Bloody typical. He was slimy as an eel whenever she was trying to wrangle anything out of him. “I was wondering, though, what did you do to get there?” His voice was soft as silk, and his eyes piercing as knives. “Just curious.”

The Doctor bit her lip and broke eye contact. “I don’t know,” she muttered. The Master leaned back in his chair, satisfied. She picked at her nails. There was still dirt underneath them. He followed her gaze to her hands, and scanned her face. Her eyebrows were knitted together, and there was a distinct downward slope to her mouth. She looked a bit miserable. 

“How are you alive?” 

The question took him off guard. “Never you mind that,” he said gruffly. 

“I need to know!” She yelled. “I thought you were _dead_! I thought I’d never see you again! You can’t just stroll back into my life, save me from a jail cell for a crime that I didn’t know I committed and pretend that everything is bloody normal!”

“I can’t tell you now. Maybe you’ll still care in the future and I might think about telling you then, but now- I think you’re too tired for that.”

The Doctor stared daggers at him, but he looked away. 

“There’s a shower nearby. Third door on the right, I think. The TARDIS will show you where to go,” he said. There was a moment where she looked up at him and her eyebrows untwisted and her eyes glimmered in curiosity. She still looked pretty annoyed. He held her gaze for a few seconds, then broke it when she got up. Her hair looked disgusting, too. It needed a wash like he needed another drink. “There’s also soap and shampoo somewhere around there. I suggest you clean yourself. Your clothes must smell terrible after all that,” and his nose curled in what he hoped looked like disgust. When he glanced back up at her, however, she looked at him like he was an irritating puzzle that was taking too long for her to figure out. With a miniscule nod, she turned around on her heel and left the room. 

The Master picked up his now-empty glass, stood up and turned to face the liquor cabinet. It was one of his favourite parts of the entire TARDIS. With brilliance and a little bit of apathy to interdimensional engineering, his liquor cabinet could hold thousands of bottles. The doors were only as wide as his arms would be if he spread them out. The Master clicked open the latch and perused for a few milliseconds, settling on a dark-looking spiced rum with vanilla liqueur. He motioned to pour the glass, but decided against it and took the whole bottle instead, popping off the lid and taking a swig when he had, once more, settled in the armchair.

He sighed, hoping the alcohol was already going to his brain. The fire kept flickering. It was funny, but it had always reminded him a little bit of her. Never going out, always hopeful, and raging on even in the darkest of times. She was brighter than the sun. It was irresistible. He checked himself for that last thought and his nose scrunched up in annoyance. She wasn’t irresistible. _He was_. She was… well, she was just a woman rummaging around for a hair conditioner at the moment. He didn’t like that thought either. Taking another gulp of rum, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. That would get her out of his TARDIS sooner. The problem was, there was fire behind his eyes too. It haunted him, even in his dreams. 

~~~

The Doctor found her way to the bathroom with some considerable difficulty. His TARDIS was cheeky, even more so than hers, and she kept changing all the corridors around so the Doctor was jogging through the passageways for at least half an hour before she managed to stumble across the bathroom. She still felt a bit miffed until she felt warm tiles under her toes. She didn’t know how or why the bathroom tiles were warm, but she had more than enough experience to know that TARDISes had a mind of their own, and couldn’t give a damn about the laws of physics or bathroom floor heating. The bathtub was gigantic, curved and embellished in gold, smelling strongly of lavender. The toilet was nowhere to be seen and the shower seemed to be the size of four regular showers, with a bunch of showerheads pointing vaguely downwards in a way that made her a bit uncertain over whether or not it was actually a shower but a carwash or something. But the Master didn’t do cars, and she didn’t see why he’d wash one in the bathroom. Still, the ‘shower’ could possibly pass for a helipad if there was no ceiling. 

There were several white, unmarked cupboards: the Doctor found one to be full of plush white towels, another to be full of alcohol, which she closed without a second glance, and another full of soaps and hair products. She peeled her clothes off delicately and left them in a crumpled heap by the door, grabbing a shampoo, conditioner, a towel (it was so fluffy, how could it possibly be _that_ fluffy!?) and a couple of soaps for good measure. She glanced between the bath and the shower, and settled on the bath. Nobody had that many showerheads unless they were up to something sinister. Turning the faucets on, the Doctor placed the towel to one side and waited a few moments until the water nearly reached the top of the bath, and then she turned the taps off and stepped in. She let out a breath of air that she hadn’t even realised she was holding; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a bath. Her TARDIS just didn’t have one, really, unless Graham was really in a mood for it. Her TARDIS liked Graham. The Doctor scrunched her nose at the thought of her friends, and sunk her head under the steaming water. It was almost scalding. 

She held her breath until her respiratory bypass kicked in, and tried to purge her mind of memories of her friends. They were better off without her. She’d brought nothing but pain into their lives. She leaned her head back, remembering Grace. Grace would still be alive if it wasn’t for her. She knew if they were here, her friends, they’d try and tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that she had done some good things too, but they were wrong. In the end, everyone left, and if they didn’t leave, they would die. That was the way it was, always had been. She remembered all the people she’d ever met, and always tried to forget them after a while. She couldn’t. They branded her mind, like a faded scar of a life she’d never had. And she had had so many lives. How many people were out there? How many people were dead because of all the lives that she had lived and forgotten? How many more people were going to die, if she was really the Timeless Child? If she was infinite, if she could never die, then she was a danger to everyone. The Time Lords were wrong. They shouldn’t have done what they did. She was a curse, and a danger to everyone she touched. In the end, she would outlive everyone. She would be there, right at the end of the Universe, praying to a nonexistent god for some shred of mercy, that it might end. 

“DOCTOR!”

The Doctor came out of the water with a spluttered gasp. The Master was there, rage in his eyes, glaring at her like she’d killed his favourite pet. “What were you _thinking_! Don’t you have a shred of sanity?! You could’ve- ” He cut himself off, looking furious. “You were in there for hours,” he said, his voice turning from fire to ice. “Don’t try something like that again.” And he slammed the door behind him, leaving the Doctor with a million questions. 

~~~

Koschei had always been fond of books. The other children in the playground were so… messy. They wanted so much, and they did whatever was in their power to get it. He didn’t really talk to anyone at the Academy. He just spent most of his time in the library. It was always quiet there. He liked that, the peace. And books never asked for anything, or cried when they didn’t get what they wanted. Books were just there, never asking and never taking. 

He had been reading a book about Markarian 421, an active galactic nucleus located in some far-off constellation named Ursula Major, when Theta had skipped into his life like a rainbow on drugs. 

“Hi!” She said, far louder than the regulated library volume. She stuck her hand out with a grin. “I’m Theta.”

Koschei eyed her over the top of his book, and frowned at her hand. It didn’t appear to be dirty or sticky, so he extended his hand carefully. She shook it with a bucketful of enthusiasm, and immediately started chattering. “What’s your name?” 

“Koschei.”

“Cool! Mine’s Theta. Except I already said that, didn’t I? That’s fine. Now you’ll remember it better,” she beamed. He stared at her in bemusement. She interpreted his silence as permission to continue talking, and promptly dragged another chair over so she could sit next to him. “I’m new. In case you couldn’t tell.” He could tell, but he had the sense not to tell her that. “I’m so glad I’ve made a new friend,” she sighed. Koschei raised his eyebrows slightly. “The Academy is so big, and I have no idea where everything is. Do you know where the Observatory is?” She asked him. 

“...Yes.” Koschei eyed her wearily. 

She smiled again. She had to be the most bubbly person he’d ever met. “Awesome! We can go there later,” she decided, as if he’d already agreed to this. She turned to Koschei with eyes so big and hopeful that he didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise. 

“Sure, I s’pose we can do that.” 

Theta lit up like a Christmas tree. Koschei found himself smiling a bit in return, which only made her grin wider. Her enthusiasm was kind of contagious. 

“What book are you reading?” She said suddenly, turning the book over and angling it towards her so she could read the title. “Oh! Markarian 421! I’ve read that already,” she said, but Koschei didn’t think she was boasting. She didn’t seem like the type. 

“That one’s good, but if you want to see something really cool you should look out for the Helix Nebula. That is an epic read,” Theta said, with the air of someone who had travelled the universe and read every book in existence. Koschei looked at her curiously. He didn’t understand anything about her, but he intended to find out. If they happened to be friends… well, so be it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the doctor and the master hanging out on gallifrey because that's what we all deserve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jesus this is so dramatic and angsty I'm sorry guys

She didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Theta reeled back, looking at the blood as if it was on a stranger’s hands. Carn had been cruel, and he was hurting and crying out for her, and she was so angry, she was so so angry, she didn’t mean to do what she did- 

Carn was dead. 

~~~

Theta doodled lazily in her textbook, scribbling random symbols over the text yammering on about some theorem. She didn’t care about theorems. She wanted to travel, to get out of this suffocating planet full of overbearing adults so she could be free to do whatever she wanted. And once she figured out how to get away, she would bring Koschei with her and they would travel the stars together for all their lives. Theta wanted to see a sun up close. She wanted to meet people on a random planet and learn their languages and make new friends and see all there was to see and go all the way to the end of the universe and back, and what she did not want to do was be stuck in a tiny room with nothing to do except her incredibly mind-numbing, stodgy, tedious studying. Studying was stupid. When she went to another planet, she was going to do every single thing except for studying. And homework. 

“Oh for the love of Rassilon, Theta, stop it!” Theta’s hand stilled. Apparently, she had been drumming her fingers on the desk subconsciously. She glanced apologetically at Koschei, who was actually doing proper homework somehow. He was so focussed. He frowned at her. “Haven’t you finished studying yet?” 

“It’s so dull,” Theta whinged. “If I was reading about interstellar travel or cold stars or black holes or something interesting, it’d be fine, but all I’ve got to read is this bloody theorem. Theorems are horrible.”

Koschei raised his eyebrows. “Which theorem is it?” He almost looked interested. 

Theta looked bashfully down at her shoes. “Can’t remember,” she muttered. She glared at the floor as if being annoyed at it might improve her focus, or at least maybe decrease her desire to procrastinate so much. 

He sighed. “You know, if you worked half as hard on classwork as you did whenever you were trying to figure out the meteorological astrodynamics of Casula III, you’d have finished studying ages ago.”

“But I’m not, am I? If the teachers really wanted us to learn, they’d quit giving us exams and give us snacks or something when we got the homework right,” Theta said, sticking her lower lip out petulantly.

“If the teachers gave us food every time we got a question right, you’d be too fat to travel,” Koschei pointed out. 

“Spoilsport.”

“If I was less of a spoilsport, you’d never get any work done.”

“Well, you’re here now, and I’m not getting any work done, am I?”

“You’re the one who’s always pranking people. Don’t think I didn’t see you when you put a frog in Mag’s bag.”

“Mag deserved it. She was being annoying.”

“The frog didn’t deserve it, though. It was just doing its regular froggy thing when you rudely interuppted its peaceful lifestyle and put it in Mag’s bag.”

Koschei smirked to himself. Theta had such a soft spot for animals. Anything she could look after would become another one of her pets. “Her expression was hilarious, you’ve got to admit.” 

Theta held her chin up high. “Not until you help me finish studying.”

He chuckled. “Fine, I’ll help you. Just don’t zone out, alright?”

Theta looked up, a smile immediately gracing her features. “Course I won’t!” Koschei moved to sit next to her, and they managed to get through the work with only a few dozen interruptions by Theta, a few of which were even accidental. 

~~~

Koschei ran through the red grass, shouting at Theta as she sprinted away. Her legs were so long. For ages, she had been taller than him, and one day she had just seemed to skyrocket up. It was so annoying when she had started to make fun of him. Penance, she had called it. He did have to admit that he gave her a bit of grief for her height, but she was so cute when she was short. Now she was tall, and Koschei was panting behind her as they raced through the grass. Being shorter was infuriating. When he regenerated, he was going to be the tallest person in the world. Or a bit taller than that. That way, Theta would always be shorter than him and he would forever be able to taunt her. 

“Stop running!” He gasped. Theta laughed and kept going. She looked so beautiful when she ran. It was sunset, and one of the suns was glinting on her face in a way that made her hair glow like a halo. The sight of her grinning at him, soaring through the sandy hills like gravity was a concept she’d decide to reject, the suns shining down upon her made something in him ignite. He kept running, leaping across until he had finally caught up to her. He tackled her in mid-air, and they both fell to the grass, panting. _Got you_. 

She kept laughing, hair splayed out on the grass, her chest rising and falling rapidly as Koschei looked down on her, his arms on either side of her head. “Got me,” she echoed. 

Koschei startled. “You’re not supposed to be looking into my head,” he accused. “Telepathy is for the older kids. We aren’t supposed to do that yet.”

Theta grinned up at him, and he received a message from her. _I don’t care_. Her smile was infectious. He found himself grinning along with her, and he closed his eyes and concentrated. 

_Hello_. He opened his eyes, looking at her. She had closed her eyes too, but the faint ghost of a smile was still playing on her lips. 

_Hi_. The suns were still glinting over the horizon, brushing over her nose and tracing the curve of her cheek. She looked like if he handled her too delicately, she would break into a million tiny pieces like a shattering glass rose, a treasure for him to hold and protect. He knew it wasn’t true. That she was stronger than any person he had ever known and ever would know. But in that moment, it was just them, and they were just there for each other. No conditions. No consequences. No prizes. Without hope, without witness, without reward. 

Koschei kissed her. Fleetingly, chastely, barely brushing his lips with hers. Theta’s eyes flew open instantly, meeting his dark eyes with her bright eyes. The smile melted away from her face, and an indecipherable expression shone in her eyes. The air seemed somehow heavy, where before it had felt weightless. He looked at her with a question in his eyes. He thought that she felt the same way. They had always been the closest that any two people could be. Maybe he was wrong? 

There was electricity crackling somewhere. Either they would burn together like a trillion stars, or they would combust. Perhaps both. 

Theta’s smiled slowly reappeared, and with it, his hope. “I’m yours,” she whispered, and pressed her lips to his. The suns set, leaving them both shrouded in darkness. They smiled against each other, and let the stars burn. 

~~~

Koschei sat at the base of the tree, Theta nestled into his side. He was reading while she gazed at the sky. There was a slight breeze rustling the leaves and blowing around Theta’s hair. Hers was a bit longer than his, but it suited her. He pressed his nose into it, nuzzling against her hair. She smelled like cinnamon and earth. He left a light kiss against her forehead. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her lips curving upwards. 

Then he sensed her body stiffening. Looking upwards, he could see a figure in the distance heading towards them. One of the other Academy kids. He couldn’t remember what his name was. The boy was definitely coming in their direction. It made a little worm of unease curl up inside his spine. 

Theta recognised him first. It was Carn, a boy she had talked to once or twice in passing or during classes. She had never remembered him as being very friendly. Up above, the breeze swelled into a gale. 

Carn marched up, grabbing Koschei by the collar and shoving him into the tree. “What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?” He roared. Koschei, caught by surprise, didn’t answer. Carn shook him aggressively. “Huh?!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Koschei said stiffly. Theta clenched her jaw. Carn was much bigger than her. He would have been one of the graduates that year. Much older than them. She may have been tall for her age, but he was built like a rock and would probably barely tremble if she tried anything. 

“You dobbed me in,” Carn spat. “All I was doing was getting some answers, and you saw and told the teacher that I’d cheated in the exam. She gave me a zero. Did you know that?” Carn shook him again. “Now I have to take the whole course again, and my family will hate me. It’s all your fault!” He raised a fist and punched him in the nose. Koschei staggered back, stumbling to the ground. Theta jumped up and tried to pull Carn off him, but he batted her away as if she was nothing more than a mosquito. 

Carn punched Koschei again, this time in the stomach. “Do you know how much I tried for that exam? I worked so hard… and for nothing. Do you even know what that feels like, you freak? I bet you’ve never failed a test in your life,” he punctuated his words with another punch as Koschei lay there bloodied and bruised. A trickle of blood ran down from his forehead, dripping into his eyelash. 

“Theta,” Koschei whispered. He breathed in short, raspy breaths. 

Theta saw red. “Get off him!” She yelled, jumping onto Karn’s back and throwing as many punches as she could. Carn was a bit affected, but he punched her back and threw her onto the grass. Theta spat the metallic taste of blood out of her mouth and leapt on him, grasping his neck with tight hands and locking on in a vice. She held on for bitter life as Carn stumbled around, blood leaking out of his nose and rushing up to his face. She held on as he gasped for mercy, as his hands scrabbled at hers and his mouth opened and shut, trying to let oxygen in, but closing it again when there was none, eyes widening in fear. She held on even after he had sunk to the ground, and she held on until he had stopped shuddering and become still. Then she finally let go. 

Theta closed her eyes and breathed in. The wind whipped around her face, leaving goosebumps trailing along her skin. She rushed over to Koschei. “Are you alright?” She asked. He looked at her with dark shadows blooming around his eyes, but he was breathing. His eyes were open. He would be okay. Theta breathed a sigh of relief, pressing her head to his chest and feeling the familiar drumbeats of his heartbeats pulsing beneath his skin. She pulled back, and noticed the look Koschei was giving her. It was admiration. Pride. And a tiny, infinitesimal bit of fear. 

Theta drew back, her breath stilling as her eyes moved traitorously downwards, to her hands. They were tinged with blood. Her eyes moved towards the body lying not too far behind her. 

She didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Theta reeled back, looking at the blood as if it was on a stranger’s hands. Carn had been cruel, and Koschei was hurting and crying out for her, and she was so angry, she was so so angry, she didn’t mean to do what she did- 

Carn was dead. 

His lips were blue. Theta supposed that would be from the lack of oxygen. He wasn’t smiling. She had read a few stories about people dying with a smile on their faces, but now she knew that was utterly fictitious. There was nothing to smile about here. His eyes were vacant and glassy, now nothing more than mere orbs to reflect the angry sky. There was still colour in his cheeks, but it would be gone soon. He would probably be gone soon. 

Theta blinked once, and then again, and once more, as if it would erase the horrific image in front of her. She’d never seen a body before. Never… never killed before. She was the reason that somebody was dead. It was a strange feeling. Theta had never thought much about death before, or even regeneration. Carn was too young to regenerate. He needed to graduate to become a Time Lord, and then he would be given the ability to regenerate. Except he would never graduate. He would never become a Time Lord. It was too late. She had taken his life. He was _dead_. 

“Thank you,” Koschei said, interrupting Theta from her thoughts. “I think you saved my life.”

_At the cost of his_ , Theta thought, but she didn’t say it. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. There was a terrible feeling coiling inside her gut. 

“We need to wash your hands,” Koschei said. “They’re dirty.” He took her wrist gently and turned her palm to the sky. It had some dirt in it, but the shining red was more stark. It branded her like a burn mark. It would become dark soon. There was no oxygen circulating to the blood cells and it would turn into nothing more than paint. 

Koschei slowly guided her to the body, and gestured for her to grab the feet, while he moved to carry the shoulders. “There’s a river not too far from here,” he said calmly. “We’ll be able to leave him there.” Theta blinked, but did as he directed. 

The weather was getting humid. It still felt reasonably cool, but there was a layer of moisture in the air that mingled with the sweat on the back of Theta’s neck and made her feel slimy. She kept her head lifted to the sky as they made their way to the river. If she looked down, she would see Carn’s shoes. Her eyes betrayed her, though. She glanced down at Carn’s left shoe. It was a large shoe. He had large feet. His shoes were quite scuffed, made of a cheap material. They didn’t look like he had looked after them very much. Her eyes fluttered closed. The shoes still burned in her mind. Her memory was almost eidetic. Not quite, though. 

“Theta! Come on,” Koschei said. It almost sounded like he was growling. She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes open. But she stopped looking at Carn’s shoes. His body was so heavy. She clung to the deadweight (Deadweight, ha! The joke rang hollow) and listened to the wind. 

After a while, they did reach the river. It wasn’t very big. Maybe a couple of metres. She tried to focus on how the water rippled through the rocks and made a funny sound, not on the splash that Carn’s body made as Koschei clumsily pushed him into the river. His clothes darkened as they absorbed water, and his face sunk gently beneath the surface without so much as a goodbye. His eyes were still open. Theta suddenly wished that she had closed them. She watched in numbness as his body sunk to the ground. It didn’t float. Of course it didn’t. Still, he was barely visible beneath the water. 

Koschei suddenly took her hand and led her to the water’s edge. “We have to wash it,” he explained. “Otherwise everyone will be suspicious.” Oh. He meant her hands. They still had blood on them. She couldn’t remember who the blood belonged to anymore. She allowed Koschei to bathe her hands in water, and kept her eyes fixated on Carn’s body as he gently began to scrub them clean. She was washing her hands in the same water that they had put the body of the person she’d killed in. 

Theta blinked suddenly, brows crossing and sense finally coming to her. She tore her hands away from Koschei. “What are we doing?!” She yelled, her eyes darting around in fear. 

Koschei stood, holding his hands up as if to reassure a frightened animal. “We just need to get rid of the evidence, that’s all,” he tried. 

“Evidence! I _killed someone_ , and you’re worried about evidence!” She screamed at him. “Carn is _dead_ , because of _me_. I could be tried for murder!”

“But you won’t be, because nobody will ever know about it.” Koschei’s eyes bored into hers. He didn’t even look tense. 

Theta stared at him. “Why are you so calm about this?” 

“If I wasn’t being calm, we would be found out by now,” Koschei said evenly. “I’m the reason we’re both still safe.”

“But don’t you even comprehend what we’ve done?!”

“What you’ve done,” he corrected quietly. 

Theta raged. “ _We_ , Koschei, because you’re the reason I killed him! He was angry at you, not at me! Don’t even think about absolving yourself of blame,” she hissed. 

He had the decency to look ashamed. “Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s my fault too. I didn’t realise he would be so angry. Will you-” his breath caught, “Will you forgive me?”

He almost showed actual remorse. She almost had the heart to forgive him. But her eyes flickered down to the body lying in the river. He wasn’t remorseful about his death. He was remorseful about her anger. It made something catch in her throat. Theta didn’t know what. Her heart twisted. 

“No.” 

“No?” Koschei repeated, confusion flitting across his features. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no, Koschei. This is it. You don’t even regret it. You don’t understand why it was wrong. I don’t think you even care that he’s dead,” Theta shivered. 

“I do care!” Koschei insisted. “Why are you being like this! Nobody will ever know!”

“That’s not the point. We just committed murder, and the most you can bring yourself to feel is being worried that we might be caught. We took away someone’s life, Koschei. Carn will never come back. This is unforgivable.”

Koschei didn’t know if she was blaming him, herself, or both of them. “But nobody will know, why does it matter?!” _Why is she looking at me like that?_

“I thought… I thought you were kind. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was just about getting what you want.”

“I am kind! I do care! I care about you!” He looked stricken. 

“Do you?” Theta asked. She said it as if she knew the answer already, and it wasn’t one that she liked. 

“Yes,” Koschei said, cupping her cheek. She pushed her away from him. 

“I- I don’t think so. I’m not sure if you can care about anything.”

Koschei faltered.

Theta looked up at him with misery etched across her features. “No more.” She turned around to leave. 

Koschei caught her arm. “Wait!” He cried. “You can’t just- you can’t just _leave_. We were going to- we _are going to_ see the universe together. You and me. Just us, nobody else,” he said. It sounded like a plea. 

Theta teetered on the edge of a precipice. Her eyelashes twitched. She pulled her arm away. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded sad and foreign. 

Koschei’s mouth opened; he reached for words, but they would not come. All that he could see in Theta’s eyes was a sorrowful certainty. She would not change her mind. 

He dropped her hand like it was searing him. “Well, that’s it, then,” he chuckled. It sounded pathetic, even to him. “No more… no more you and me. No more us.” If she changed her mind, if she said yes, he would embrace her in a heartbeat. 

But Theta could be stone-cold. She could be hard. She could be furious, and righteous, and stubborn, and terrible, and merciless. He saw no mercy in her eyes. They looked as lifeless as the body, cold and still beneath the water beside them. 

“No. It’s over.” The words tasted like poison in Theta’s mouth. She turned away again: she was not going to turn back. She had teetered, and she had fallen. There was no going back now. It was done. 

The wind had died down. As Theta walked away from the only friend she had ever known, she felt a part of her dying with it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the doctor finds her mates again!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys! this fic is actually going really well - I'm several chapters ahead , so I'll be updating every few days instead of every week like i normally would because I'm doing nanowrimo and that coupled with quarantine is making me abnormally productive :D. thank you for giving me kudos/comments, it makes my day to know that my work is being enjoyed!
> 
> p.s. there are going to be tea shenanigans for the next several chapters. it's an ongoing thing. also there's going to be quite a lot yaz angst in the next couple of chapters o.o brace yourselves

The Doctor sighed. She was bored. There was nothing to do here, in the Master’s TARDIS. She wanted to go exploring. She hadn’t seen any planets since she’d met the last seven humans in existence, and at that point in time, she was a little too preoccupied with keeping them alive to do any sightseeing. Not that there were many sights to see at the end of humanity. Just a bunch of rubble and dust, really. She had smelled death in the air. 

Anyway. The Doctor had washed her clothes, and she had sat in the laundry-room wearing the clothes that the Master had put her in when she first came until the washing machine was done. There wasn’t anything else in his TARDIS that she could wear. Or would wear. She had put on her usual clothes immediately, feeling much more comfortable now that she was back in her normal gear. In a TARDIS, wearing her braces and rainbow shirt, she was nearly able to pretend she was back at home with her fam. She left the other clothes in a small pile on a table in the laundry-room. Didn’t know what to do with them. And she was itching to see some humans. She missed humans. That was it, though. She didn’t miss anything else. Absolutely nothing. Nope. 

The Doctor made her way to the TARDIS console room with a newfound sense of purpose. She needed to find some humans, and she needed to find them ASAP. Actually, she should probably see what her fam was up to. Check in on ‘em. See if they were doing alright. The Doctor navigated her way around his TARDIS as if it was second nature, which it kind of was. She set the course for twenty-first-century Sheffield, making sure that they would land near her fam. Hopefully they were still there. 

His TARDIS didn’t make the same noise as hers did. A very distant memory came back to her, of River Song telling her that she’d left the brakes on. It was better with the brakes on, though. Her TARDIS didn’t mind. This one seemed to have an automatic no-brake rule. It sounded really weird, but in a smooth way like when you’ve got a bicycle and you accidentally invent the quadricycle a few centuries early. Hashtag relatable. She shouldn’t do that. The Doctor wasn’t very good at modern slang. Sometimes she would use twenty-seventh-century slang in the fourteenth century, and everyone would give her funny looks. Funnier than normal, anyway. 

The Doctor swung about the TARDIS console, flipping switches and pressing buttons and doing all the things that the manual would tell her not to do. The TARDIS’s noise seemed a little bit more familiar now. When it landed with a ‘thud’, she bounded to the doorway. 

“Going somewhere?” 

She paused, hand on the door handle. 

“Sheffield, I see. Miss your little pets already, do we, Doctor?” His tone was patronising. She didn’t like it. 

“Why? Are you really going to try and stop me?” She turned around, a challenge blazing in her eyes. 

“I’d like to come too, actually,” the Master said, the barest trace of a smirk on his face. 

“What? No!” The Doctor looked incredulous. “They can’t see you!”

“Aww, why not?” He replied, teasing her. “They’re just humans. So many disgusting little _emotionsme_. What a twist.”

“That is not true! You are a bad person, and they’ll never trust me again-”

“So are you,” he interrupted. “You’re just as bad. In fact, you’re probably worse, seeing as you don’t even take the credit for all the terrible things you’ve done. We’ve both destroyed our own race, but only one of us ever truly faced it. And it wasn’t you.”

She was silent. 

“Although I suppose the bit about them never trusting you again, that part’s probably rather accurate, I’d say,” he said deviously. “What would they think of you? Mucking about with a low-life like me, they’d have no idea what kinds of vile things we were doing.” His voice suggestively dropped an octave. 

“Shut up! I’m going, and you can’t follow me,” the Doctor commanded. “Don’t even think about it.” 

She turned to leave when she suddenly felt the Master’s breath on her neck. His face was right next to hers. How had he moved so fast? 

“Just remember, Doctor,” he said quietly, meeting her gaze. “I know you. I know you better than any human ever has or ever will. I know who you are and what you’ve done, and I understand you. That’s something that nobody else will ever have.” It sounded like a threat.

Something pricked at the corner of her eyes. The Doctor slammed the door shut behind her. Seconds later, she sensed the disappearance of his TARDIS. She breathed a sigh of ...something. Not relief. At least he was gone. 

The Doctor looked around her, absorbing her surroundings. At least she was definitely in Sheffield. The navigation system on his TARDIS was better than hers. There were people walking all around, and she could even see a phone booth. It was red, though. She vaguely remembered the type of house that she had sent the chameleon circuit on that other TARDIS back on Gallifrey to - it was a small, regular-sized house, identical to every other house in the block. She sighed. She would have to go knocking on all the doors in the street. 

The first person was a middle-aged lady with scruffy blond hair and a pale blue jumper. She looked like she hadn’t had enough coffee. “Hi,” the Doctor said brightly, “I’m the Doctor. Do you happen to know some friends of mine? Their names are Yaz, Ryan and-” The door was shut in her face. The Doctor frowned. Maybe they thought she was selling something? Oh well, it was probably the lack of coffee (and sleep, judging by the bags under the woman’s eyes).

She tried again with the next house. The man who opened it looked quite old. “Hi, I’m the Doctor! Do you know- ”

The door shut again. She sighed. This was going to be very tedious. 

Three hours and a hundred and seventy-four houses later, the Doctor knocked on the door of another person’s house. Some of the people hadn’t been home when she’d knocked, and others definitely had but had just ignored her, so she might have to do another round tomorrow if she couldn’t find them today. The Doctor shuddered at the thought. She stood at the door for a few seconds, and then, when nobody answered, she turned back to leave. 

“Doctor? Is that you?” 

The Doctor’s ears pricked up and her eyes grew wide. A smile bloomed on her face. “YAZ!” She turned around, and to her delight, there stood P.C. Yasmin Khan, looking shocked and as happy to see the Doctor as she was to see her. She ran and scooped Yaz up in a giant bear hug, holding her close. She wasn’t really fond of touching in this incarnation, but today was a special day, and Yasmin Khan was a special girl. 

“How are you here?! I thought you were dead!” Yaz said. 

“Remember Ko Sharmus? He saved my life. Apparently he was part of the bunch that sent the Cyberium back to Earth in the nineteenth century, which is where Percy Shelley found it and- well, you know what happened then. He took the Death Particle and used it on Gallifrey.”

“What? Really? So the Master’s dead?” Yaz asked. She looked hopeful. 

“...Yeah. Yeah, he’s dead,” the Doctor replied. Yaz didn’t seem to notice her hesitation. 

Yaz sighed. “God, Doctor, I’m so glad you’re here. I kept thinking about it, and I just felt more terrible every time I started imagining what had happened to you.”

“I just needed to keep all you lot safe.”

“Well, you never know with Sheffield - there are mad aliens lurking around every corner,” Yaz joked. The Doctor grinned. They were back to their usual banter. Thank goodness. She loved banter. 

“Good thing I’m a mad alien then!” She replied cheerily. 

“Come on in, the others are inside,” Yaz gestured towards the door. 

Thirteen mirrored her gesture. “Ladies first. Oh wait, yeah-” She fumbled awkwardly and ducked inside. 

The immediate inside of this TARDIS looked like any regular old house, but Yaz told her to take a left turn and there was the console room, complete with the little white round things. She loved the round things. She took another turn into a little living room with sofas and tables and plus, comfy-looking armchairs. Ryan and Graham were playing chess on the table. 

“Guess who I found!” Yaz said. 

Ryan saw her first. “Doctor! You’re alive! Jeez, it’s so good to see you!” He gave her a quick hug. Wow, maybe it really was a hugging day. 

Graham removed his glasses. “Oh, thank God, Doc, is that really you?!”

“Yeah,” she grinned at him. 

“Wow. I reckon you’ve grown.”

“Have I?” The Doctor replied, momentarily confused. 

“Nah, ‘course not, I’m just messing with you,” Graham laughed, giving her a pat on the back. “What the hell happened to you?” 

The Doctor shared a sideways look with Yaz. “Well, Ko Sharmus took the Death Particle and sacrificed himself. He was one of the people who sent the Cyberium to Earth, so he felt like it was his duty. I took another TARDIS back, and came back here to pick up you guys! How long’s it been since you’ve seen me last?”

“Uh, about a month,” Ryan chipped in. 

“A month!? Wait, really?”

“Yeah, we’ve been staying with Ravio, Yedlarmi and Ethan for the last few weeks, you know, getting ‘em used to twenty-first-century Earth. They felt a bit out of place in Sheffield, so we’ve been coming over for tea every day and trying to help them integrate in society. Ravio’s been working at the local pet shop, part-time, and Ethan’s getting his driver’s license soon,” Graham said proudly. “He’s out at the library with Yedlarmi at the moment, though. Studying.” 

“Why’d it take you so long to get here?” 

The Doctor stopped. “Uh, I suppose the TARDIS was just feeling a bit wonky. You know how she is with her navigations. A gal wants to go to the thirtieth century and ends up in the thirteenth century!”

“...But she’s a time machine. Couldn’t you just go back?” Ryan asked doubtfully. 

“She’s also a sentient creature, Ryan! Sometimes she just feels a bit moody, is all, and don’t tell her that I said that or she’ll be really offended.”The Doctor wagged a finger at Ryan. 

Ravio stepped in, holding a mug with a blue cat on it and steam rising from the top. “Doctor! I thought you were dead?”

The Doctor nodded energetically. “Yeah! Well, I was going to be, and then I wasn’t… S’all a bit complicated really. How’ve you been? Is that tea? Can I have some?” She was already on her way to the kitchen. “Do you even have a kitchen? I bet your kettle isn’t as good as mine. I can upgrade yours, you know. Give it flavours.”

“No, no, no, don’t do that, nobody wants flavours, I’m perfectly happy with my Earl Grey, thanks,” Graham said hurriedly. 

Ryan grinned. “Where’s your sense of adventure, gramps?” He nudged Graham in the side with his elbow. “Can you do fairy floss?” He asked the Doctor.

Graham exclaimed “Fairy bread tea? You’re mad, son.”

“‘Course I can!”

“You’re the one who only drinks Earl Grey,” Ryan replied snootily. “Earl Grey’s just leaf soup. Fairy floss is where it’s at,” he said in satisfaction. Yaz privately agreed, but Graham looked so offended that she daren’t say anything.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tardis fam fluff! more tea shenanigans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is quite a bit longer than the rest of the chapters (sorry, i'm trying to write as much as i can but i keep forgetting to do new chapters and I'm like 'agh, i need to keep doing this bit! i can't just split it off here!' but i'm somehow several chapters ahead and i forgot to post yesterday :( sorry, i was busy writing. quarantine's got be bored af and everything in this is either extremely fluffy or angsty like really spicy indian food. i'm craving butter chicken rn. come join my doctor who therapy chat on tumblr! we're all angsting about jodie whittaker and quarantine atm. see you in two/three days (i should probably set a reminder to update, oops). have a nice day! go wash your hands.

“How many flavours has your kettle got, then?” Ravio asked suspiciously. 

“Erm, I think about, uh, a hundred and six, give or take?” The Doctor replied, taking a screwdriver that had materialised from one of the cupboards and setting to work on the kettle. She wondered if the others would mind if she painted it orange. 

“A hundred and six!” Yaz exclaimed. “How can you possibly have a hundred and six flavours of tea?!” 

“Well, only about fifty of them are Earth flavours, and the rest are all foreign stuff, y’know,” the Doctor said, grabbing a pair of goggles and a hammer. “Mind you, Paganini makes a bloody epic brew, so one of them was his special mix.”

“Who?” Ravio asked. 

“Nineteenth-century violinist,” the Doctor replied. “He was Italian, too. That was fun. Haven’t seen many of my Italian friends lately. He made some pretty great pasta.”

“So what are the flavours on your kettle?” 

“Let’s see: I’ve got mandarin, English breakfast, chicken tikka masala, apple, indigo, cabbage (although I don’t drink that one, nobody ever does, I just added it ‘cause I was bored), Vitamin D-”

“How can you have Vitamin-D-flavoured tea?” Yaz asked incredulously. “Isn’t that, like, the sun?” 

Graham and Ryan were still quietly bickering over whether fairy floss was a valid tea flavour. 

“Yeah, but if you just get a little bit of,” the Doctor mimed scooping something, “and distill it and stir it ‘round a bit, you’ve got yourself some Vitamin D tea!”

Yaz and Ravio looked baffled. 

“How do you do… that, exactly?” Ravio mimicked the Doctor’s hand motion. 

“S’easy. All you need to do is-”

_Crash_. The Doctor heard the tinkling sound of broken glass. Ryan and Graham had broken a lamp. 

“Oi, you two,” she said to Graham and Ryan, “Pipe down. You don’t need to get into a scuffle over tea, I’ve already added fairy floss and Earl Grey to the kettle. It’s too late.” She gestured enthusiastically to the newly-reconstructed kettle enthusiastically, placing her goggles on her forehead, “Look!”

Graham and Ryan looked at the kettle with matching expressions of horror. Yaz laughed. Even Ravio had to admit it looked bizarre. The kettle was bright orange (Where had the Doctor gotten paint? They didn’t know) with little purple decorating it, and also some seventy-something dials. 

“How did you do that so fast?” Graham said in disbelief. 

“What are all the dials for?” Yaz questioned. 

“You can have multiple flavours!” The Doctor bounced energetically on her toes. “If you’re feeling peckish, you can have some coriander, and then you can add a bit of pomegranate, kombucha, maple syrup, even grass! The dials are for how much you want of something. See, if you want more than one flavour, you turn up the grass dial,” she turned up the dial labeled ‘G’, “then you can add a bit of peppermint,” she turned the dial labelled ‘P’ halfway, “and you can put in a bit of Earl Grey as well!” She turned the kettle on. After a few seconds, it started whistling. Not regular kettle whistling. Yaz thought it might be the British National Anthem. The Doctor beamed at them. “So what do you think?”

The humans were all a bit speechless. The Doctor didn’t notice that, though, as she poured the liquid - that was the only thing they could call it really, it wasn’t tea anymore - into a mug, and passed it to Graham. “Here! Have a try! You can be my tester.”

Graham really did not want to be her tester, but he couldn’t see a way out of the situation where he said no, so he took the mug with hesitation and slowly raised the mug to his lips. The others looked on in anticipation. Ryan looked like the cat that had got the cream. He wanted popcorn for this. 

It tasted… well, it tasted like grass. And peppermint. And Earl Grey. It didn’t taste bad, exactly; it just tasted alien. Graham had never eaten grass before, let alone drunk it. He had no idea what it tasted like even after he’d swallowed it down. 

“So?” The Doctor looked at him eagerly. “What do you think?”

“Yeah, it’s brilliant, Doc! Very grassy,” Graham said, glancing at Ryan’s cheesy grin and spotting an opportunity, “In fact, I think Ryan would like some of it! Wouldn’t you, son?” He raised the mug and held it over to Ryan, whose smile had dropped immediately. 

Ryan looked at Graham with betrayal burning in his eyes. He took the mug gingerly, grimacing slightly, taking a quick sip. His eyes scrunched up. Grass was not nice. Not nice at all. Neither was Earl Grey. “You know, I think I’m more in the mood for coffee,” Ryan said, tight-lipped. Graham smirked at him. 

“Oh, well, I can do that too!” 

Ryan blanched. “Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” he chuckled nervously. 

“It’s no trouble! I love building stuff!” The Doctor said.

“Uh, you know what, I think I’ve got a bit of a stomach ache,” Ryan replied quickly, “I don’t think I can really drink anything right now.”

“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed. 

Yaz wanted to cheer her up, so she said “I’d like a cup of tea, if you don’t mind, Doctor.”

The Doctor looked up at her brightly. “Would you really?” Yaz nodded. “Well, I’m sure I can do something about that, Yaz. What would you like?” 

“Surprise me,” Yaz said. 

The Doctor smirked. “You’ll regret that, Yasmin Khan.” She looked like she was going to blindly feed Yaz a cup of chillies. Yaz half-regretted it. 

She left to sit in the tea room with Ravio, Ryan and Graham, who had gotten back to their chess. They had placed the mug of grass tea on the table, but every so often when Graham thought everyone wasn’t looking, he snuck a little bit of it. Ravio had declared herself the referee of their game (which had developed into more of a bloody battle) and Yaz had drawn up another chair and made herself the self-designated peacekeeper, who would start yelling at everyone to calm down and be quiet whenever it devolved into yelling. She had no idea that chess could be so aggressive. 

Ethan and Yedlarmi arrived back a little while later, bearing hot chips, which everyone descended upon with vigour. “Hi guys!” 

The Doctor heard the door and came out of her hidey-hole in the kitchen, where she had spent a suspiciously long time brewing Yaz’s tea. She wasn’t even done yet. “Hiya, Ethan!”

Ethan almost fell over in surprise. He was the one carrying the chips, which meant that he was a vital asset to Graham, Ryan and Yaz. “SAVE THE CHIPS!” Graham yelled, lunging for them. Ethan managed to get his balance again, but Graham had snatched the chips from them and was hugging them close to his chest. Ryan and Yaz sympathised with him. Yedlarmi half-heartedly tried to wrestle them off him, but Graham wasn’t having any of it. 

“Doctor!” Ethan had said once he had processed that Graham now had his chips and did not look to be giving them back any time soon, “It’s good to see you!” 

“You too! Want some tea?” 

Graham gave Ethan a nod and an enthusiastic thumbs up. Ryan drew his finger across his throat. Ethan gave the two of them a weird look. “Er, no thanks, I think I’ll pass.”

“Suit yourself,” the Doctor said flippantly, and put her goggles back on and got back to work. Yaz wondered if it would even be recognisable as tea by the time the Doctor was done with it. She gently eased the chips out from Graham’s iron grip, and proceeded to dole them out evenly among everyone, saving an extra serving for the Doctor. 

Speaking of, the Doctor appeared out of the kitchen in a flourish of energy, bearing a large silver pot. She was wearing mittens with little ducks on them. Yaz stood up, staring at the pot. “Doctor.. .is that the tea that you were making for me?” She asked cautiously. 

“Yep! Hope you like it, Yaz,” the Doctor replied, placing it on the table that Ryan and Graham were playing chess on. The pot was enormous. Yaz was certain that it was going to leave a burn mark on the table. The Doctor took off the lid carefully and the room was suddenly filled with steam that had come billowing out from the pot. 

“How am I supposed to drink it?” Yaz asked. Did the Doctor misinterpret her and make soup instead?

“Ah! Sorry, I forgot,” the Doctor exclaimed, jogging back to the kitchen and grabbing some mugs. “Here you go!” She passed one to Yaz and set the others on the table. The whole thing was taking up a large amount of table space, and Graham looked very disgruntled at these new developments. 

Yaz wondered what she was supposed to do with the mug. She watched as the Doctor used it to scoop tea out of the pot. She did the same. The liquid looked light brown, with a bunch of tiny unidentifiable things floating on the top. It smelled really strong, like chocolate and cafes and 20th century Paris. Yaz wondered what the Doctor had put in it. She tentatively sipped it. 

The Doctor stared at Yaz, trying to gauge her reaction. “Do you like it?” She asked. She’d spent ages on it, and she’d put a gazillion things in it. She even shredded and melted down a tiny piece of Pythagoras’ sunglasses. If Yaz didn’t like it, she was going to throw the entire pot in the nearest river. 

“Yeah! Actually, that’s really good,” Yaz said, taking another sip. 

The Doctor looked thrilled. “Really? Oh, that’s brilliant.” She took a giant gulp of the tea, regretting it as soon as it started burning her throat. “Oh, agh, ooh, that is very hot, agh,” she said as she took another drink. Yaz giggled. 

“WHERE’VE THE CHIPS GONE?!” Graham bellowed, noticing the mysterious disappearance of the chips. Nobody knew. Graham, after a few minutes of fruitlessly aggressive body searches, settled down unhappily. He took a concessional penguin mug, and brightened up a little bit when he had nearly beaten Ryan.   
~~~

The Master lied. Well, no. He hadn’t said anything. But it was more a lie of omission. He’d dematerialised the TARDIS and parked her in another spot a few hundred metres away, where he had detected the Doctor’s petty little human pets were hiding. It was a good thing his chameleon circuit actually worked. Her TARDIS was terribly faulty. If she was sensible, she would get a new one. But she was far too sentimental for that. Sentimentality was what had killed her so many times before, and it would continue to do so. It was what he hated most about her. 

The Master stepped out from what appeared to be a little cafe with a ‘Closed’ sign on its doors. Pfft. As if He’d ever run a cafe. Cafes were so boring. If he would run any sort of consumption-based institute, it would be an illegal bar that sold all the latest and greatest intoxications. The guest list would be _extremely_ exclusive. As in, the Doctor would be the only one allowed in. He imagined what she would be like on drugs. He had seen her drunk before, many times; he himself had occasionally been intoxicated too, of course, but drugs would probably break her. Or at least allow somebody to see what was already broken. She could never have that. 

He stepped outside and glared at the humans walking by on the street. He had activated a perception filter. He didn’t want anybody to notice him. Not his usual style, but if the Doctor saw him, she would have his head. He strolled to his left, using his TCE on a passerby who bumped into him. He didn’t bother pocketing the tiny doll left on the street. He only liked to collect memoirs. That day at the Adelaide Gallery, for example, was a memoir of the day when he had achieved one of the finest moments of his career: making the Doctor kneel and call him ‘Master’. Gods, that had been immeasurably satisfying. 

The house - well, not house, it was obviously a poorly-disguised TARDIS - was ugly. It was all red bricks and classic foundations, a little white door and curtained windows, but in the front garden, there was a fountain with a little statue of Da Vinci and an inscription in Latin. He would bet good money on it being romantic poetry. The thought made him shudder. He slipped through the gate in the pristine white picket fence and didn’t bother knocking on the door. Inside, he could see the humans. They were clearly talking to the Doctor. He could hear her voice, energetic and happy, nearly shouting with excitement. At least, that was what they could hear. He knew that she was tired. She was so, so tired. The whole thing was a play, and she was the puppetmaster. The humans would probably leave her if they ever tried to understand her. Even after Gallifrey, they didn’t know it all. Even she didn’t know it all. The thought comforted him. 

He settled down in an armchair and looked at the room. There were tiny golden circles on the ceiling. And the walls. The wallpaper was pale cream, and if he focussed on the wallpaper he could make out circles there too. Gallifreyan. He didn’t want to read it. He hoped it wasn’t more bad poetry. 

He had had the Cyberium in his head. He didn’t anymore, but it was what had saved his life when the Doctor had gotten one of the humans to sacrifice himself using the Death Particle. She’d barely even hesitated when he had offered. It was insulting. If she was going to try and kill him, she could at least have had the decency to do it when she was killing herself too. He’d much rather that they die together. But the Cyberium had been swirling around, nearly devouring his mind with its power. It stopped him from really being a living organism, so the Death Particle had been ineffective. It was a bit of a shame, though, that the Time Lord/Cybermen hybrids had been destroyed. They had had impressive designs, and he hated to see useless things. He had put them in a pit together with the other Cybermen. Useless things didn’t deserve to be seen. But he had survived the wreckage of Gallifrey once more. The last one standing. They both were. It was an endless war. They both wanted the other one to stand with them, but neither of them would ever make the first move. So the Master had wrestled the Cyberium from his mind. It had left him a little battered and bruised, but intact. He had forced it into the dead human’s body, and then dumped it into a black hole a million years in the future, on the edge of the universe. That would keep it at bay for a while. It wouldn’t be dead, not quite, but it preferred its host to be living, which meant that it would be deeply unhappy for a very long time until some sorry idiot found it and wreaked havoc. It would probably end up being either him or the Doctor. Things did always seem to end up that way. 

He had been alone for a while. Loneliness suited him in this form: he was dark and mysterious enough for people to be intrigued, but too mean and intimidating for them to ever come any closer. He hadn’t made any friends in this form. He had languished in the ruins of Gallifrey for a week; but that had gotten boring quickly, and so he caused a few massacres and wars, but that had been dull too. It was like quenching thirst with salt water. Satisfying, at first, but the hunger within him came back with a vengeance. She would disapprove of it. So he had moved to another planet; started a new civilisation, gotten the locals to worship him as their god. It had been… intoxicating. But they were so small and short. Their lifespans were nothing more than mayflies to him. And their false worship was, in the end, meaningless. He had waged a war after that. It didn’t help. He watched the pretty shapes of the smoke and fire, listened to the musical cry of battle, saw the planet burn. And then there was nothing. It was anticlimactic. 

So the Master had left. He had gone back to Gallifrey. He didn’t do anything there, he just thought. He thought for a long time. It felt like years. The drumming was there, in his head, beating away at every second: _one-two-three-four. One-two-three-four_. He went away to make some enemies. Killing people that you had been trying to kill for a while became more satisfying the longer it took. He found that it was therapeutic. He was on the hunt for one of aforementioned enemies (well, he was on a break) when he heard about the Doctor. A prison cell didn’t seem like enough to keep her locked up. The only thing that truly did the trick was her own grief and shame. 

The Master waited in his chair, and he watched. He watched as the Doctor bounced around with her human friends. She looked so pathetic. Her mental walls were flimsy, as per usual, and he was able to look inside without so much as lifting a finger. He did it delicately, so she wouldn’t notice, but she was too preoccupied with the humans and trying to keep her emotions hidden from herself that she hadn’t bothered to put up shields. It was Sheffield, after all. Who was going to try and break into her mind?

Him. 

He didn’t like the way that the human girl was staring at her. The pretty one. He couldn’t remember her name. Yash? Didn’t matter. She was looking at the Doctor in adoration. More so than the others, that was. And the Doctor almost seemed to be reciprocating the emotion. He didn’t like that. He gently peeled away the layers of her mind, dissecting it like a skilled neurosurgeon. The Doctor liked her. The Master wondered how long she would hate him for if he killed her. Well, she seemed like a pretty thing. So young. It would be a shame to let that go to waste. 

He crept into the kitchen to watch the Doctor make tea. She was so much more interesting to look at when she was alone. He considered revealing himself right there and then, but she was putting so much care into that tea for Yanna. Speaking of, he had just come up with a better idea. He would have to wait till the Doctor had left, though. She could discover the lovely (subjectively speaking) surprise in the morning. He went back to the living room and snatched the chips while one of the old humans was bickering with another two about a stalemate. The subsequent outrage was absolutely worth it. 

~~~

The Doctor sat down on the couch next to Yaz, Ethan and Yedlarmi. They were all sporting mugs filled to the brim with Yaz’s tea, which everyone seemed to like quite a lot (which made Yaz quite possessive of it). She wanted a nap. The sofa was comfy. She leaned over and sighed, closing her eyes. The sun was so bright. 

Yaz smiled at the Doctor, who was nuzzling her head into her neck. She carefully took the mug that was still full of tea from the Doctor’s grip, and placed it on the coffee table. She felt a bit weird, having a Time Lord sort-of snuggling her. The Doctor, who seemed to be able to read her thoughts, snuck her arms around Yaz’s torso, effectively hugging Yaz like a koala. Yaz noticed she smelled nice. Like honey and cinnamon. She felt alarmed. _Snap out of it, Yaz! She’s telepathic, you can’t let her hear this!_ The Doctor mumbled into her collarbone, “Stop stressing, Yaz. S’alright…” She yawned. Yaz blushed bright red. Ryan pointed finger guns at her and grinned. Yaz glared at him hard enough to burn holes in his face. Ryan held his hands up in surrender and turned back to the chess game, where, having put Graham in a stalemate, they had both agreed on a redo. 

Yaz sighed, and wrapped her arms around the Doctor. Her hair was so soft. The Doctor buried her face in Yaz’s shirt. Yaz rubbed her hand in small, soothing circles on the Doctor’s back. Eventually she fell asleep too. 

Ryan nudged Graham and pointed to Yaz and the Doctor and wiggled his eyebrows. Graham smiled. Yaz deserved it. From what he’d seen, she’d been pining after the Doc for a while, and the Doc was well oblivious in those types of situations. They looked extremely comfortable cuddling each other. Ryan snuck a quick photo for possible blackmail material. 

The Doctor hadn’t slept soundly in a while. It was the feeling of Yaz’s warmth. The Doctor would have sworn that she was the cosiest human ever. The last time she had properly slept must’ve been years ago. She surrendered her mind completely, and dozed off into a blissful sleep. 

~~~

The Master had discovered a newfound hatred for ‘Yaz’. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked so comfortable around someone who wasn’t him. Especially a human. And she looked genuinely comfortable, too, not the awkward fidgety mess she’d been in the kitchen or when she was trying to show off to the humans. He felt an emotion he hadn’t felt in an extremely long time. He couldn’t even remember the name of it. Was that… jealousy? Gods, he didn’t think he’d ever feel that. But those two looked too awfully comfortable, and there was the ugly purple monster rising in his chest, wanting it to be him holding her like that. He never would. But he would think about it. 

The Master slipped into her mind with a practiced ease. It was much more simple to do it when she was asleep, because she couldn’t be sure that it was really him and not just a figment of her imagination. He hid in the shadows of her mind, sifting through all her thoughts and feelings. The emotions were less acute when she was unconscious, but they were still there beneath the surface. He checked through her mind of anything relating to the prison that he’d found her in. She didn’t know anything about it. Interesting. He didn’t know much more than she did, either, which was an irritating feeling. She was feeling a _lot_ of things about him. More than she felt about Yaz, but the feelings she felt for Yaz were apparently almost completely positive. It was the opposite way around for him. She didn’t even want to be his friend anymore; the Timeless Child revelation had caused that. Or perhaps it was that he destroyed her home planet. 

He had done it for her, in a way. Those stuffy Time Lords, with their ancient rules and their lack of regard for anything remotely ethical or moral, they had caused her pain. And he had killed them. They deserved it, anyway. He had waited an awfully long time before he had wiped them out. He’d lasted longer than her. She felt a bit conflicted about that. Actually, she felt conflicted about most of it. She didn’t seem to have the same respect for the Cybermens’ new outfits as he did, but she regretted letting Ko Sharmus take the fall. He must’ve been that old fellow. The Master was careful to keep his own mind protections up as he explored the Doctor’s head, but it was tantalising to go all in. That required a fully consenting mind, though. She had walls all around her head, so that she herself couldn’t see the things that haunted her. There was an entire section that was just blank and foggy. The Timeless Child. He didn’t bother trying to delve into that one. Suddenly, the Master felt a force pushing back. The Doctor was regaining consciousness. She could sense something. He swiftly exited her mind before she could identify him as the source of disturbance. She wouldn’t like to see him again. He opened his eyes, and watched as she stirred uneasily, hugging Yaz a little tighter and squeezing her eyes tight again. Her walls were completely up now.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yaz got kidnapped. oops.

The Master stared at the human girl in front of him. He had brought Yaz to his TARDIS and put her in a containment chamber after everyone else had had their dinner and gone to sleep. He didn’t see what her appeal was. She seemed terribly young. Early to mid-twenties, probably. He had accessed her records from the TARDIS database. She was a police officer. He’d never had much respect for the officers and law enforcement on Gallifrey. More often than not, they had been the corrupt ones. This girl looked like a goody-two-shoes. He had knocked her out with chloroform. She was lying on the ground at the moment. She looked small. He had no idea what the Doctor saw in her. 

Yaz stirred. The ground was cold, hard and unfamiliar. She opened her eyes blearily and blinked in shock. She didn’t know where she was, but it looked a lot like a TARDIS. And not the Doctor’s. She had a migraine. She pressed a hand to her head absentmindedly as she stared at her surroundings. 

“Ah, right, sorry,” someone said. Their voice sounded extremely familiar, and not one that Yaz was at all comfortable with. “Forgot about the perception filter. Silly me.” And then something happened - Yaz didn’t quite know how to describe it; like her vision was fogged up and she could suddenly see. 

She saw the Master, and she gave a small shriek of shock, scrambling back. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re dead,” she said emphatically, as if saying it might make him a bit more dead. 

“Sorry to disappoint,” the Master drawled, “but not quite.” He fluttered his hands dramatically. “Surprise!”

“What am I doing here, then?” Yaz demanded, clambering to her feet. The TARDIS was spinning a bit. Maybe it was just her head. She blinked several times in succession. 

The Master shrugged. He looked at her with amusement lingering in his expression, like she was a little cat that had turned up on his doorstep asking for milk. 

Yaz stared at him dubiously. “Why did you kidnap me?”

“I didn’t kidnap you!” He defended himself. “Well, I did a bit, but not that much. You basically wandered over here of your own accord.” That was a lie. She had been completely knocked out. He must have carried her in; she wasn’t able to do much of anything. 

“Well, take me back to the Doctor, then!” 

“I’d rather not.” The Master twirled. “Isn’t it such a great space? Love my TARDIS. I personally prefer my TARDIS to the Doctor’s, but if you like hers better, I s’pose I’ll have to make do,” he said, pouting. 

Yaz strided to the doors and - “Wouldn’t do that if I were you, love” - flung them open. She took a few steps back. They were in deep space. It was really cold. She didn’t know space was that cold. Bollocks. 

She looked at the Master in horror. “Why are we in space?!”

“Oh, everywhere’s space if you look at it differently, this is just another petrol stop,” the Master replied with indifference. “And you know what the Doctor can be like, Yaz,” he said coolly. “She’s very persistent.”

“Why did you kidnap me?!” Yaz repeated her earlier question, marching right up to the Master’s face. “What do you need me for?” 

He looked at her like she was an idiot. “If I didn’t tell you before, what makes you think that I’m going to change my mind and tell you now? I’m not as fickle as the Doctor, you know.” He chuckled at his own joke as if he knew something that she didn’t. He probably knew heaps that he didn’t. 

Yaz narrowed her eyes. “Wait - this is about the Doctor.”

“No, I just brought you in for the pure joy of your human company,” the Master responded sarcastically. “Yes, it’s about the Doctor, who else would it be? That was a rhetorical question, you know. You don’t need to answer. In fact, I’d really rather that you just kept quiet, because I haven’t spent quality bonding time with humans in a wh-iiiii-le,” he said, stretching out the vowels like the words were unfamiliar in his mouth, “and I am quickly rediscovering how irritating your voices are. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, except, like, a dozen times worse.”

“Why me specifically?” Yaz asked. “Why not Ryan, or Graham, or any of the others?”

He stayed silent, looking at her with a challenge in his eyes. He raised one eyebrow and swayed to a tune in his head slowly. 

Yaz racked her brains. Then her mind flashed back to the snuggle she’d shared with the Doctor on the couch, earlier that day. Her eyes grew wide. “Are you - are you _jealous_?” She asked incredulously. The Master glared at her and stopped swaying. “Of me? Really?” 

“Bugger this,” the Master said. “You’re way too annoying. Au revoir!” And with that tender farewell, he left the room. 

“Hey, wait- where are you going?” The Master slammed the door. Yaz frowned. She tried opening the door. It was locked. She sighed unhappily. She didn’t understand why the Master would ever kidnap _her_ and take her to his ship. He was a homicidal maniac, didn’t he have better things to do? Anyway, it wasn’t like he had any actual grounds on which to be jealous of her, if her hunch was right. She and the Doctor were just friends, it wasn’t like she could compete with the Doctor’s basically-immortal best frenemy.

She was worried about the Doctor. He could have taken any of the others, even the Doctor herself, but maybe he was just taking her to hurt the Doctor. Despite herself, a tiny bit of pride welled up at the thought. She was so young compared to the Doctor. She didn’t even understand how old she really was. But she’d travelled to so many places, and seen so many things, and Yasmin Khan never thought she could compare to all that. She had imagined it sometimes, though. When the Doctor had looked at her when they were trying to fix the Praxeus disaster and Yaz had wanted to steal the alien tech - she had looked at her like she actually, genuinely cared and was worried about her. It made Yaz feel all mushy and fuzzy. The Doctor was so - how could she ever describe it? - big. The Doctor was bigger than everyone else, older and more full of life and more experienced than anyone Yaz had ever known in her life. She looked at stars that she had probably seen a thousand times before as if it was the first time. She had this joy, this powerful emotion within her that was just magnetic. 

Yaz didn’t know how to really understand her. She tried her best, but in the end the Doctor was an alien and Yaz was human. She had tried to squish all her hopes that they could ever be anything more than friends, but the Doctor felt like so much more than her. She didn’t know if she was enough. The Master taking her… it made her feel like she might mean something to the Doctor. More than the others. Not enough, necessarily, but something. Yaz clung to the tiny sliver of hope in her heart.

She was worried, though. If she was right, and she did mean something to the Doctor, then she wasn’t safe. She didn’t remember the Master as being merciful. Or kind. Or any of the good things that she had seen in the Doctor. She wouldn’t take kindly to being his prisoner. Yaz decided to make it as torturous for him as possible. Maybe if she annoyed him enough, he would get bored of her and let her go. She was aware that that was wishful thinking, but in her current predicament, she didn’t have much else. They were in space. She had no idea where. She couldn’t imagine how the Doctor could find her, and it wasn’t like Yaz could escape. 

She looked around at the room miserably. There was no furniture. Not even anything she could sit on. The floor did not look comfortable. She tried to scope out the most comfortable spot, but there was hardly any difference, so she settled down in a corner and tried to go to sleep. She hoped it would make the time pass quicker. 

~~~

“You idiot! You absolute bloody idiot! Why would you let this happen to her? What if she’s in danger right now? What if she’s _dead_? Oh my goodness, Yasmin Khan, I am so, so sorry, this is all my fault!” The Doctor rubbed her hands on her face as she rambled to herself frantically in the living room, pacing back and forth as she did so. Everyone else was freaking out quietly on the sofa. 

The Doctor had discovered that Yaz was missing at about five am. in the morning. She hadn’t been sleeping very well and had gone to check up on her friends. Everyone else was in their beds, but when she got to Yaz’s, she was gone. The Doctor had yelled bloody murder and woken up everyone in the TARDIS, and they had all searched the TARDIS for half an hour looking for her and shouting around before deciding that it was no use: Yaz was gone. The Doctor was beside herself, and had been groaning about how she should have done something or how she wasn’t taking enough precautions and what if Yaz had accidentally tried to fly the TARDIS or something and gotten stranded on a hostile alien planet with no oxygen where there was a war going on and she got her head blown up in a kerfuffle over bananas -

“Doc, calm down,” Graham said. “She’ll be fine. Yaz is a tough little cookie.”

The Doctor stopped. She didn’t realise she had said all of that out loud. “Sorry,” she said bashfully. “I just - I’m worried about her, you know?”

“I think everyone in Sheffield knows that,” Ryan snipped. Graham gave him a look. 

“Can’t we use the TARDIS to find her?” Ravio pointed out. 

“That would be brilliant, if I could figure out where she was,” the Doctor grumbled. Then she had an idea. “Wait! Yes, I can!” She sprinted to the console room, skidding on the floor. The others were a bit alarmed at her sudden exit, but followed after her a few seconds later. The Doctor checked the TARDIS controls. “If I can lock onto her neurobiotic sequence, I might be able to figure out where she is!” She scanned the database for Yasmin Khan. _Searching… no records of Yasmin Khan found._

The Doctor stared at the screen. “What? That can’t be possible, she must be somewhere.”

“Is she dead?” Ethan asked worriedly. 

“No, she’d still have an active neurobiotic sequence if she was dead, they still last for a while after death and she’s only been missing for less than twenty-four hours,” the Doctor said, typing a string of numbers into the keyboard. She stopped, and looked up at the others in horror. “I think she’s in another universe.”

~~~

It was morning. At least, it felt like it was. Yaz felt tired, so she assumed it must be. She hadn’t gotten any sleep. The floor was cold. She wasn’t even wearing a jacket. The Master had turned up a few hours ago with a piece of buttered toast and a cup of tea. Probably breakfast. She had taken half an hour to think about it before she ate anything. Just in case it was poisoned. She didn’t trust the Master at all. But she had thought about it, and he stood to gain more from the Doctor if she was alive than if she was dead. This didn’t mean that she doubted he had the heart to kill her, of course. He seemed like he would kill anything. But when he came and dropped the food off, he didn’t really seem in a murderous kind of mood. He seemed a bit mardy, actually. The tea was surprisingly good, but not nearly as good as the one she had had yesterday, Yaz thought wistfully. It had been a while since then. She hoped the Master would come back and give her lunch. Then maybe she could persuade him to let her go. Or at least let her out of this tiny cell. 

To her slight surprise and consternation, he did come, some while later. She didn’t know how psychopathic Time Lord brains worked, but she had reckoned that they wouldn’t be very considerate. He had made her scrambled eggs. It surpassed her expectations, honestly. The eggs were pretty good.

“Can’t you let me out of this room?” She pleaded. “It’s so small. And cold. And it’s not like I’ll be able to escape, we’re in deep space. I don’t know how to fly a TARDIS. I’m not much of a threat.”

“I never thought of you as one,” the Master chuckled dryly. He tilted his head in consideration. “Promise to behave?” His eyes sparkled mischievously. 

Yaz nodded quickly. 

“Fine, then. Don’t be a nuisance,” he warned, and he left again. But this time he left the door open. 

Yaz stood up. She decided to take the scrambled eggs with her. Her mother had raised her never to let good food go to waste. And if the breakfast wasn’t poisoned, she didn’t see why the eggs should be. 

She stepped through the door as if there might be an electrical field that she couldn’t see which would incinerate her the millisecond she touched it. There wasn’t. Yaz found that the chamber which she had been put in opened up to a corridor which led to the console room. The Master wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She thought that the Master’s console room looked a bit like the Doctor’s actually. They were both TARDISes, of course, so they had the same basic stuff, but his had a lot of the same drama and flair that the Doctor’s TARDIS had. A little bit more than hers, if Yaz was being honest.

She wandered through another corridor that had a whole lot of doors in it. They were made out of mahogany. None of them had labels, but one had a little circular window on it. Yaz could see a whale on the other side. She decided not to open that one. 

She tried one door which opened up to a gigantic rainforest, filled with the chatter of birds, monkeys and a dozen other animals which Yaz couldn’t name. She looked around a tiny bit and saw a toucan, but then the thought occurred to her that if there were wild things like toucans then there could probably also be dangerous wild things like tigers. She left pretty swiftly after that. 

Yaz had found a giant library behind one of the doors. It had to have at least seven or eight floors. She tried reading one that had a picture of some peculiar contraption on the front cover. The writing was in circles. Literal circles. Yaz opened another one which was in Spanish. She couldn’t speak Spanish. Mrs Gutierrez from Year Three primary school had given up on her after the first two lessons, when Yaz still couldn’t remember what ‘thank you’ was in Spanish. She hadn’t remembered anything from Year Three Spanish, save for one very useful word: ‘Sacapuntas’. If her memory served her correctly, it meant pencil sharpener. Mrs Gutierrez had a right laugh in her face when Yaz said that one. She had learned French the following year (not that she could remember much from that either, but the teacher was a lot nicer and she had given them home-baked cookies occasionally, which would have drawn in any child, no matter how bad they were at conjugating verbs).

She did find a smaller room, adjacent to the library. The wallpaper was red, and it had tiny circles embellished in all the vertices of the room, dotting across the edges of the ceiling and walls. She sat down in an expensive-looking armchair and ate her scrambled eggs while she looked around the room. There was a large-ish table beside her chair, across from which another chair stood, identical to hers. There was a little window to her right that had stained glass, depicting a picture of a mother holding a child in front of a river. The mother was crying. Yaz couldn’t actually see anything through the window, but she supposed there wasn’t any way she could see through a TARDIS. The Doctor’s TARDIS’s front windows weren’t see-through, even though it kind of looked like they were from the outside. There was still light streaming in through the stained glass, though, illuminating fine particles of dust that swirled around within the room. It looked a bit like sunlight, but also a bit too alien to be any terrestrial sunlight. The books didn’t have dust on them, even though they didn’t look like they had been cracked open in decades. They were neatly tucked into the ancient bookshelves, spanning maybe nine or ten levels high. Yaz couldn’t have touched the ceiling even if she had stood on the top of the chair and stretched up as high as she could. There was a thick carpet on the ground, displaying a curly pattern that didn’t look as organised and purposeful as the circles on the walls, but looked extremely elegant nonetheless. It was a deep purple, with yellow streaks shooting through the middle and curving around. 

Yaz placed her scrambled eggs down on the table and stood up, peering closely at the titles of the books. Some of the titles were in English. Yaz took one out gently, as if it was so old that it might crumble in her hands should she hold it too tightly, and cracked it open, leafing through the pages. It seemed to be about astronomy. She stopped on one page that showed a picture of a beautiful nebula, mostly dark blue that was fast approaching black with an oval-shaped area that was sky-blue, nearly aqua. It had deep streaks of green and orange running through it. The caption read ‘Medusa Cascades’. There was no description or summary. Yaz put the book back and crooked her finger on the spine of another book, this one also in English. There was a picture on the front of a gun, with a smaller image of a body in the background. Yaz put that one back just as quickly as she had taken it out. She didn’t need to know about guns. She spent a while just standing in that room, looking through the books. Some of them mentioned the Doctor. Others mentioned the Master. Several even mentioned both. One was titled ‘The Time Lords and the Daleks: History of the Time War’. Yaz’s interests were definitely piqued by that one. She took it out and sat down to read, munching on her scrambled eggs as she held the book on her lap and started reading. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” a voice said suddenly. Yaz nearly jumped out of her skin in terror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys, hope you're having a good day! please kudos/comment if you enjoy :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yaz is still kidnapped

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: brexit mention

Yaz pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the thudding beat of her heart to reassure herself that she was still alive after having been given the fright of her life. “You shouldn’t be sneaking up on people like that!” She turned around to face the Master angrily. “Could’ve given me a heart attack or something!” 

“Mm, I forget how weak your human... heart is,” the Master replied. He didn’t sound remotely sorry. “You should think about getting another one for spare, if your frail human body could take it.”

Yaz glowered. “Just because you’ve got one more heart than me doesn’t give you the right to act all uppity and superior.”

“Ooh, feisty! Girl’s got a snap, hasn’t she?” The Master grinned. Yaz sensed he was deflecting. 

“What’s the Time War?” Yaz questioned. “This book,” she held up said book, “is about the Time War, and you rudely interrupted me while I was just about to start reading it. What is it?”

The Master feux-scowled. “Oh, I doubt the Doctor wants you to know about that. She wouldn’t be too pleased if one of her little pets started getting suspicious.”

“And I doubt you’ve got the Doctor in your best interests,” Yaz fired back. “So what is it?”

The Master raised an eyebrow. He seemed to be in a better mood now. “Are you really, really sure you’d like to know? The Time War is not a tale for the light-hearted.” He smirked. 

“I’m sure,” Yaz said with certainty. She had faced countless aliens. She had learned not to be surprised by small things. 

“Well, sit down class, we’re about to have a history lesson,” the Master flexed his fingers and cracked a knuckle. “The Time War was the greatest war in the history of existence. It was bigger than anything your brain could possibly hope to comprehend. An aeons-long war between the two greatest races of all time: the Time Lords and the Daleks.” He paused for dramatic effect. 

Yaz felt a shiver of horror. She vividly remembered the Daleks. She could imagine the kind of carnage that a war between an entire race of them and an entire race of people like the Doctor and the Master would bring. 

The Master’s grin widened. “Yes. It turned galaxies into crumbling ruins, and it would have destroyed the universe if it hadn’t been stopped.”

“How was it stopped?” Yaz asked. 

“By none other than the woman you’ve been travelling with.”

“The- the Doctor stopped that? How?” 

“Ah, the question of the hour,” the Master said, his hands rising up with a flourish. “The one thing she really doesn’t want to tell you, otherwise you’ll never think of her the same way again.”

“Just tell me!” Yaz demanded. 

“Very well. She killed them all.”

Yaz felt like her heart stopped. “But you destroyed it, I saw Gallifrey. You made that happen.”

“Only after she’d already done it. Centuries later, she came back and undid the whole thing. Huge paradox. I think there were three of her. And all of them were ‘him’s, not ‘her’s. Anyway, it was a waste of time,” the Master scoffed. 

“What do you mean, she killed them all? She can’t have killed all those people…”

“Oh yes, my dear, she can. And she did. Two point four seven billion children, countless others. And all the Daleks, of course, but nobody was weeping over them much.”

Yaz’s eyelashes fluttered. She blinked once, twice, three times. The ground was still in place. The Master was still standing there looking at her. The Doctor had killed her entire race. How could she do that? She felt so conflicted. The Doctor was a good person, right? She couldn’t kill her entire race. The Master had to be lying. Yaz looked at his face. The Master gazed at her somberly, like he pitied her. But if he was telling the truth, then it meant that the Doctor had been lying to them all the entire time. She hadn’t been who she said she was. Yaz remembered how she had told her about Ko Sharmus. She had let him take the fall. And - and when they had faced the Dalek, there had been murderous rage in the Doctor’s eyes. The Cybermen. She was prepared to destroy the rest of their race too. So maybe the Doctor wasn’t who she thought she was. The thought made Yaz feel hollow. Maybe when the Doctor had looked at her like that and Yaz had felt that glimmer of hope… maybe it wasn’t real. How much of the Doctor was real, and how much had she been hiding from them?

Yaz slumped down to the floor in despair. “Is that what she’s really like, then? Was she lying to us that entire time?”

The Master sat down next to her. “You’re not the only ones she’s lying to. She hates telling people abotu herself, hates thinking about her past. She gets all touchy whenever anyone brings it up. It’s why she hates me so much.”

Yaz looked at him. Sitting down next to her, looking nearly as despondent as she felt, she was almost able to sympathise with him. “I don’t think she hates you.”

“You’re quite wrong about that, my dear,” the Master laughed. 

“I mean - maybe she does hate you, but she seems to understand a little bit. Sometimes she gets angry and I get a bit scared of her, you know. I think she doesn’t like hanging out with you because you remind her of herself.”

He looked at her, frowning. “You know, you’re smarter than you look.” He sighed and got up to leave. Yaz didn’t know whether to feel complimented or insulted. His shoulders were hunched. She watched as he left, without any glamour or dramatic exit. Just leaving. That was it. 

~~~

Yaz explored some more of the TARDIS later, after she had processed the Time War revelation. The Master didn’t seem quite as terrifying when the Doctor, a woman with whom she was great friends with, had killed what seemed to be just as many people and races as he had. It just seemed more black-and-white on the surface. She came across the kitchen. The Master was making tea. He didn’t seem surprised by her appearance, but she was surprised to see him doing something as domestic as putting the kettle on. It just didn’t suit him. 

Yaz took a seat at the kitchen countertop. “How old are you?”

“Not as old as the Doctor.”

“I thought you two were, like, really old friends or something.”

“We were.”

“So why is she older than you?”

“That’s a story for another day.”

Yaz frowned. He seemed more closed in now. She tried another route. “What was it like on Gallifrey?”

“Fun,” the Master smiled. “Gallifrey was beautiful. We went to the Time Lord Academy. Me and her. That was where we picked our titles.”

“So you’re not called the Master?” Yaz wasn’t too fazed. She had never really believed that ‘the Doctor’ was the Doctor’s real name. ‘The Master’ seemed pretty obnoxious too. 

“No.”

“Would you tell me your real name if I asked nicely?” Yaz didn’t expect him to tell her. When the Doctor had told them so little about herself, she didn’t think that the Master would open up much faster.

“No,” he growled. “There is only one person alive in this universe who knows my real name, and she is not in this room.”

“What did Gallifrey used to look like? Before it was destroyed?” Yaz didn’t name names. 

“The grass was red, the skies were bronze, and the cities were beautiful. The people were so clever, all-knowing, but the governing Time Lords were a bunch of stuffy old pricks.” 

He sounded a bit touchy about it, so Yaz didn’t push the point. “Why did you destroy it?”

“That’s between the Doctor and me.”

“Why did she destroy it?”

“Because of the Time War, I already told you that.”

“No, I know, but - why would she kill all those people? Is that what she’s like, when there’s no humans around to - to stop her?”

“Yeah.” The Master abandoned the kettle, heading out. 

Yaz followed him. “Where’re you going?” She asked. 

“To the console room. Come on, I’ll show you,” he replied. They reached the console room and the Master began flicking levers and pulling switches that Yaz couldn’t figure out if she tried, and the TARDIS made a smooth noise that sounded nothing like the Doctor’s TARDIS’s wheezing and groaning. 

“Where are we going?” Yaz felt nervous. This would be her first time outside since the Master had kidnapped her. Maybe she could escape and get back to the Doctor. 

“You’ll see,” he said mysteriously. The TARDIS gently thudded as it landed. He beckoned her to the doorway. “Ladies first.”

Yaz scrunched her nose at the minor courtesy, but gently pushed on the door. Outside, she could see fire. Golden skies. Red grassy plains. It was Gallifrey. 

She stepped outside, trying to absorb all of it. They had been in such a hurry the last time she’d been here that she didn’t have time to fully comprehend the level of destruction that had been wreaked on the Doctor’s home planet. The buildings had crumbled, the streets were covered in dust and burning embers, and there were a few bodies she could see. The sight made her shudder in revulsion. 

“Why would you bring me here?” She yelled at the Master. “I don’t want to see this.”

“I think you do,” the Master contradicted her. “You see, you picture the Doctor as a goddess. A some infallible deity. This is what it looked like.”

“But you did this,” Yaz rebutted. 

“This is exactly like how it looked the first time around, except maybe with less carnage. The Time War was all-consuming; it burned everything. The Daleks and the Time Lords were the two most destructive races with everything to lose, pitted against each other. It was the end of everything. And she stopped it. Used the most destructive weapon of all; a bit like my Death Particle. It was the one thing that the Time Lords hadn’t used. Can you even begin to imagine how terrible it must have been?” He said furiously, standing close to her face. “Two point four seven _billion_. All dead. And she ran away to wallow in misery and self-pity like the coward that she was, and she picked up other humans along the way to drown her sorrows. We’re both terrible people,” he said to Yaz, “just in different ways.”

“Why would you kill everyone again, though? Why would you go to all that trouble and kill every single one of them if she’d already done it and brought them back?” Yaz demanded. “Why would you even bother? What could possibly be so terrible that you, a Time Lord, who’s seen some of the most terrible things that have ever happened and probably made more of them happen yourself, kill your entire race? There wasn’t any war. No galaxies were burning. It was peaceful, and you killed them all.” Yaz shook with anger. Billions of people. He had killed billions. Him and the Doctor. Neither of them were innocent, but she didn’t see why she should pity either of them. 

“Because they lied to me, to her, to everyone. She was more important than anyone ever imagined,” the Master said bitterly. “She had a billion lives before me, and she was the start of our race. She was the first. They lied to all of us. They deserved to die.”

Yaz was confused, but the Master stormed back into the TARDIS. “I shouldn’t have taken you here,” he said. She felt a little bit scared. “You shouldn’t have come. Just… just get out.” She stepped inside the TARDIS anyway, deciding that even being in the same ship as a genocidal psychopath was probably better than being on her own on a lifeless, burning planet with no escape ticket. She tentatively shut the door behind her. On seeing her enter, the Master huffed and left the console room. Yaz’s eyes followed his figure as he disappeared down the corridor. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of all that. It made her feel homesick. She missed the Doctor, of course. And Ryan and Graham. But she missed her mum and her sister as well. She missed her job. She missed the structured, predictable lifestyle that she had had on Earth. Aliens were so complicated. She just wanted to be sitting on the couch with Sonya, drinking a cup of tea and complaining to her about Brexit. She wanted Brexit to be the most annoying thing happening again. It felt like it was becoming too much. The Doctor only seemed more impossible now that she knew more about her, and Yaz was beginning to understand that she could never truly know everything about the Doctor. It seemed like even the Doctor didn’t know everything about herself. She lowered her eyes to the ground and thought about the wreck of a brilliant civilisation that was just on the other side of the door she was leaning against. It was overwhelming. She just wanted to go home.


	7. Chapter 7

The Master skulked away to the library. It was quite possibly his favourite room in the TARDIS, despite the lack of a liquor cabinet. It was giant, and full of books from top to bottom. He loved to read. He loved looking at the countless books in hundreds, maybe thousands of languages, and knowing that he could read them all. It made him feel so satisfied. The room had that beautiful smell of books that have aged like fine wine, and absolutely reeked of knowledge. He loved knowledge. Knowledge was power. And power was something he wanted a lot of. There was a new level that he had recently added, far more opulent and magnificent than the other (which was saying a lot, because the rest of his library was very tasteful if he did say so himself). He had ransacked all the libraries and all the books from Gallifrey. There had been so many. If he had just left it there, it would have rotted and gone to waste. And he hated wasting things. It had been strange, looking at an empty Gallifreyan library. It was one of the most irritating things he’d even seen, like a little itch in his brain. It felt unnatural. But it felt the opposite way when he stood outside and gazed upon the ruins that he had caused. The civilisation that he had massacred. That had felt right. 

He had moved all of the books (it had taken a long time, there were so many and he wasn’t completely sure that he had even found them all) to the new level at the top, but it had a bio-locked door and a password in Gallifreyan that even the Doctor probably couldn’t guess. He had chosen it while partying with Marilyn Monroe and a few other notables, but that was a whole other story. The Master went up the grand, marble staircase to the door with no handle, just a small screen. He placed his hand upon it, and it beeped four times. Then a tiny screen appeared out of the door, and he typed the password into it. The door opened with a ‘whoosh’ sound and he went up another marble staircase, this time with velvet carpeting the stairs and gold tints on the banisters. Only the best for the Time Lords. 

The room was invisible from the rest of his library, blocked off by a perception filter that would bar anyone who didn’t share his DNA. The walls were transparent, but there was a crystal railing that looked down upon the mezzanine floors beneath, and looked up to the massive reinforced-glass ceiling above. It twinkled with the brilliance of a billion stars. They were all burning, and it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He always did love to see stars die. 

The books on this floor were visibly different to the books beneath him. These were embossed in thick red leather, with gold, circular print on them. Some of the books downstairs were in Gallifreyan, but everything here was from his home. This was all that was left, really. The knowledge and history of the Time Lords, all in the Master’s TARDIS. At his will and bidding. He could burn it, if he felt like it. He could leave it to gather dust for millennia, too. It was all his. There were a few chairs decorating the place. Not many, because he never had guests, just because having large, blood-red chairs made of old wood was comforting. Not just any wood, though. All the chairs in his library were built from the recycling tip of TARDISes. They were supposed to be incinerated, but he had stolen some of the pieces when he was younger. It felt more comfortable sitting in a chair fizzing with artron energy than anything made on some unfamiliar planet. 

The Master settled in one of them and opened a drawer in the bookshelf, which had a glass of red wine in it. He lay his head back against the chair and looked up to the stars above him. He couldn’t even count how many galaxies were there. How many were beyond his vision, planets that had never been touched and stars that were being born and dying just beyond the ceiling. He felt as though, if he reached out, his hands would brush the sky, caress the vast, inky black expanse of space. It was majestic. 

He thought about his discussion with Yaz outside. He hadn’t really meant to tell her as much as he did. She was very persistent, and talking to humans often felt like talking to a blank wall for all their lack of intelligence and understanding, so it had been easy to vent as if nobody was listening. He didn’t think that was a good thing. Bit dangerous, ranting to a random human. Although he didn’t think that she or the others would survive for more than a few years if they kept traveling consistently with the Doctor, so he wasn’t too stressed about any uncomfortable truths leaking out. He would never tell her his name, of course. That was just laughable. Even though she would know for hardly any time at all, it was far too personal to just be flinging at every human he met. The only person alive who knew his name was the Doctor, and everyone knew how he felt about her - well, they didn’t, actually, but she sort of understood how he felt about her, and that was enough as far as he was concerned. 

The Time War… well, it would alter her opinion of the Doctor forever, that was certain. She would never look at her in quite the same way again, which made him feel better. The Master wondered if Yaz was feeling out of her depth yet. Time Lords were a dangerous business, even if the Doctor looked like peaches and cream from the outside. At least he was honest about the kind of person he was from the get-go, but the Doctor was a bloody enigma with all her layers and complexities. So was he, except that was a lot deeper down. And everything was complex enough before they started talking about the bloody Timeless Child. Just thinking about it gave him a minor headache and made his hands clench into fists at his sides. 

Anyway. Where was he? It was so easy to ramble when he didn’t have to create a psychic barrier so the Doctor couldn’t see what was actually going on inside his head. Monologuing was just very entertaining. Oh right, yeah, Yaz. The longer amount of time she spent with him, the less happy she was going to be when she saw the Doctor again. It was perfect. She would have more doubts, more fears, more anxiety about each trip that she took, suddenly gaining a new awareness that she might not make it back from the next one. Then she would leave. And the others would follow. It was always the first person who was the most difficult to crack, and the most worthwhile. 

Once one person had left, the seed of doubt would be planted. Humans didn’t live forever, and they knew it. The others would follow soon behind, leaving the Doctor all on her own. Nobody to turn to except him. There was even a chance that, with no witnesses and no humans to provoke her sense of righteousness, she might even consider standing with him once again. She had had her turn, back when he was Missy. Eight decades of torturous repentance and trying to be _good_. Maybe he could get her to try his way for once. Maybe they could just coexist for a while, no stakes or bodies or ghastly reminders of their past. For once, he would like to see the Doctor when he wasn’t lying to her, murdering her friends or plotting to kill her. 

~~~

The Doctor wasn’t pacing anymore. She had cleverly sent everyone out to the supermarket for groceries, certain that they had not been suspicious at all, and she had used the house-shaped TARDIS to go and fetch her TARDIS and bring it to Sheffield. After she had parked both of them on Earth and put her TARDIS in a convenient spot near the house, she had spent a while just hanging out in her TARDIS. It was so nice to just sit there and do nothing, and pretend that everything was fine. She never got to have a moment after almost-killing the Master, and she only felt more exhausted now. The TARDIS had hummed happily when she had entered it, embracing her with a mental warmth that only it knew how to give, like a cool, soothing balm for her brains. She had had several cups of tea in a bunch of kooky flavours, and it felt so relaxing to finally unwind. She thought about just checking out. Going to some other planet and forgetting about all of them. She had only considered it briefly, but still. Ryan and Graham were together at home, and the other humans were where they belonged. Earth. It was much safer for them. But Yaz was still out there, and she was the only reason that the Doctor didn’t pack up and skip town. She had a duty of care, and she couldn’t just abandon her friend. Half an hour later, when her friends had arrived back from Waitrose, the Doctor had faced the music and come back down to earth. 

She had brought Ryan and Graham to her TARDIS. They had all agreed that Yedlarmi, Ravio and Ethan were better off staying behind for this one. They had all had enough of life-threatening situations and intergalactic travel, which this would likely turn out to be. Graham and Ryan knew Yaz, though. They were worried about her, so the Doctor felt obligated to let them try to help. At the moment, they were all in the console room, planning. 

“Why would they take Yaz, though?” Graham asked. All three of them were sitting on the entrance steps, nursing mugs. Ryan had gotten coffee, and the other two had gotten tea. 

“Yeah, what’s different about Yaz? Whoever took her could easily have taken any of us, but they took Yaz,” Ryan pondered. “Why wouldn’t they take you, Doctor? I mean, you’re super smart and, like, an alien, so wouldn’t it make more sense to grab you?” 

“Unless whoever took Yaz was doing it because of you, Doc,” Graham said thoughtfully. 

“So basically everyone who has it in for you. Well, that narrows it down,” Ryan snarked.

“But how did they take her out of this universe?” The Doctor asked nobody in particular. Her eyebrows were creased like a crumpled tissue. “What’s the point of taking her to another universe - _Oh_.” She got up and ran to get her iPhone. It was somewhere within the TARDIS, but she couldn’t remember where she’d put it. 

Ryan and Graham stared at her in confusion. “What’re you doing now, Doc? Have you figured it out?” Graham asked hopefully. 

“I think I might’ve,” the Doctor replied grimly. “Could one of you two call my phone? I don’t know where it is.”

Ryan took his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll do the honours.”

“I think I left mine in my car,” Graham commented. Seconds later, there was the sound of the SpongeBob theme song. 

Ryan looked like he didn’t know whether to be insulted or chuffed. “Is that the ringtone you have for me?” He looked a bit horrified, actually. 

“Yeah,” The Doctor shrugged, rummaging around the room, trying to detect her phone. 

“What’s mine, then?”

“Aha!” The Doctor cried jubilantly, waving her iPhone around. Ryan squinted at his profile picture. It was a squid. 

“Mariah Carey, Make It Happen” the Doctor said in response to Graham’s question. “Although, I don’t think Mariah Carey’s ringtone is a Mariah Carey song.” She scrolled through her list of contacts, jabbing at one simply called ‘O’. 

“What do you need your phone for?” Ryan asked. 

“I’ve got a hunch, and if I’m right, then I know where Yaz is,” the Doctor replied. She typed in _Did you kidnap my friend?_ Cut to the chase, that was how she liked it. She pressed send. 

“You know where Yaz is?!” Graham said excitedly. 

“Well, I don’t know where she’s with,” the Doctor pressed her lips into a tight smile. “But I do know who she’s with.”

“What are you waiting for? Tell us!” Ryan said. 

The Doctor sighed. “You’re really not gonna like it.” Ryan made a sharp gesture with his hands as if to say _Out with it, then_. She took a deep breath. “If I’m right,” her phone dinged and she glanced down at it with alarm and, having read the text, bit her lip, “which I am, Yaz was kidnapped by the Master.”

Ryan swore loudly. The TARDIS made a small wheeze of disapproval. “You said he was dead!”

“I did not,” the Doctor replied indignantly. 

“You heavily implied it,” Graham said. 

“Alright, I may have omitted some stuff, but at least we know where she is now!”

“No, we don’t,” Ryan deadpanned. 

“Well, we don’t, but we have a clue! And we know that she’s alive,” the Doctor said confidently. 

Graham made a face. “Well, that’s reassuring.”

“Watch it! No sulking on my ship. We’ve got a clue, and that is very good news.” The Doctor was quite impressed with herself, actually. 

“Alright. If Yaz is with the Master, how do we know he hasn’t tortured her or something?” Ryan asked. 

“Yeah, for all we know, Yaz could be locked up in a cupboard somewhere. She probably isn’t even getting any sarnies,” Graham said. He looked stressed. 

“We can’t know whether Yaz is fine - which she is, probably, hopefully - so what we need to do is figure out where the Master could've taken her.”

“Is there some way you can communicate with him?” Ryan asked. The Doctor stole a guilty glance at her phone. Ryan followed her gaze and it clicked in his mind. “Wait! That’s why you needed the phone.... You were texting him,” he concluded, looking betrayed. “Do you have his number? Have you been texting him or something?”

“No! I haven’t been texting him,” the Doctor tried to reassure him. 

“But did you text him just then, to ask if he had Yaz?” Graham asked.

The Doctor shifted on her feet and looked at the ground. Graham took it as an admission of guilt. “Why do you have his contact?” He didn’t look angry, he just looked concerned and a little disappointed. The Doctor found that it made her feel worse. 

“I’ve known him as long as I can remember,” she said, glad to be honest. “He was my best friend and the one person who was always there, even after all my human friends had left me or… or gone away. When he was pretending to be O, he gave me his number. I still kept it, even after he told me who he was. I just hid the phone away.”

“So you didn’t talk to him after that day on the plane,” Ryan finished. 

“No. He texted me a couple of times after, but I didn’t reply.” The Doctor was lying about that last bit. She had replied a few times, just to ask him why he’d done all of it, and who the Timeless Child was. When he had evaded her questions and only served to provoke her further, she stopped asking. 

She looked up at her fam. “D’you think you can forgive me?”

Ryan and Graham were silent for a moment, having a mute conversation with their eyes before turning back to her. “Course we do, Doc,” Graham smiled. 

“Yeah. You’re our fam, I reckon it was already a given,” Ryan added comfortingly. 

“Really?” The Doctor asked them hopefully. 

“Absolutely. Now stop being mushy, we’ve gotta find Yaz,” Ryan reminded them. 

“About that,” the Doctor said “I think I might know where she could be.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the silurians make a comeback (well, sort of)

Yaz was in the rainforest. She had found a side door that led up a bunch of staircases onto a platform above the treetops where she could just walk around and look down without being afraid of chancing upon a tiger or any deadly alien creatures. The platform was also fenced in with bars, wires and stuff, so when she found out the hard way that some deadly alien animals could fly, she didn’t end up dying a horrible death. Which was great. She had also discovered that there _were_ tigers in the rainforest. Yaz didn’t know whether to feel excited or terrified of them, but she felt a lot more safe up on the elevated platform where they couldn’t see her. She sat down on the walkway and listened to the birds cawing among the giant leafy green trees. The buzzing of insects and the general hum of the wildlife was oddly peaceful, despite the energy in the forest. Yaz watched with lidded eyes as something resembling a lemur that was quite possibly not a lemur climbed up to the platform from a nearby tree and stared at her with giant eyes that took up a large portion of its face. It wasn’t very large, with thick dark fur and ambient golden eyes that peered at her curiously. It looked mostly harmless, but Yaz didn’t want to touch it just in case it was actually a giant predator in disguise with giant fangs full of venom. 

“Hi, little fella,” Yaz smiled playfully. She waved her hand at the animal. Its large golden eyes blinked brightly. It chittered back to her in a secret language and stretched its mouth open wide, so she could see that its teeth were actually quite small and probably not very harmful. A monarch butterfly flew out of its mouth. Yaz drew back in alarm, but both creatures seemed unharmed and unbothered. Yaz watched as the butterfly flapped away lazily, its wings glimmering in sunlight that she didn’t know the origin of. The rainforest had a ceiling somewhere, and yet the butterfly glowed in a brilliant azure. The edges of its wings sunk into a deep black with tiny white flecks. Yaz thought they looked a lot like stars. She and the lemur watched as the butterfly floated off beyond a canopy of trees and out of sight. 

The lemur jumped from the grates on the fence to a nearby palm tree branch. It looked at her once more and then it, too, disappeared into the forest. Yaz could’ve sworn that it winked its big, yellow eyes at her. 

She traipsed back to the exit, watching out for any other alien creatures. She didn’t see any more tigers, although a monkey at one point caught sight of her and attracted all the attention of his mates, so she jogged back down to the ground and shut the door behind her, hands trailing on the mahogany. She hadn’t seen the Master since they last talked. She didn’t really want to see him. He probably felt the same. She had found a bedroom at some point, where she had happily spent the last few nights reading some books that she had gathered from the library. 

Yaz returned to her room, feeling tired. She thought the TARDIS was probably just having mercy on her by allowing it to pop up around the place sometimes. The Master probably thought she lived in the kitchen next to the kettle like a racoon. But her little place was nice. The Master had never been anywhere near it and possibly didn’t know of its existence, for which she was extremely grateful. It had light purple wallpaper with jasmine flowers dotting across, and a picture of a constellation on the ceiling. Yaz’s bed wasn’t very big, but when she was younger she had shared a room with Sonya and they had both had single beds as long as she could remember, so she didn’t mind having a small space. It felt more cosy. The bed had some blue throw pillows and a lilac-coloured duvet, with a little oak bedside table where she had put her books. It felt kind of nice, in a horrible way. Yaz missed the Doctor so much, and she missed her room back on the Doctor’s TARDIS, but both TARDISes were psychic. Her old room was pretty similar to this one, really, except it had had more of her stuff in it. And Ryan and Graham would come over sometimes and chat with her about random stuff. They were all trying to improve their Cluedo skills, and Yaz’s room was the go-to for board games. Probably because it had a couch. Sometimes, when the Doctor wasn’t working on maintenance, she would even join in too. They would all have some tea and scones and Graham would boast about how good he was getting at the game until Ryan surprised everybody and won by a landslide. 

Thinking about her fam made Yaz feel melancholy. It made the room she had almost grown accustomed to feel a lot more like a prison. She wanted to see the Doctor again. She hadn’t seen her for what felt like years. She knew it was much less than that, but the Doctor was like a drug. She was so _everything_ that Yaz had been drawn to her like a magnet, that when she had gone it felt like Yaz had lost a limb. She squeezed her eyes tight and left to go to the console room. 

Yaz spent a while just standing there, staring at the indecipherable symbols. She recalled that the Doctor’s TARDIS had had similar symbols. Maybe it was their language. It looked beautiful. 

Yaz didn’t know how to operate a TARDIS. She didn’t know how to turn it on, or how to tell if it was already on, or how to set coordinates or find a manual to get instructions from, but she had seen the Doctor whizzing around the controls like a spinning top, ficking and jabbing at anything she could get her hands on. She didn’t think the Doctor knew how to fly the TARDIS perfectly. After all, the amount of times they had done things like gotten dressed up for a party in twentieth-century California only to find themselves in fourteenth-century Israel were innumerable. So Yaz inhaled, exhaled, and started pushing everything. She looked at the screen, her adrenaline getting the better of her as she started typing out random numbers and crossing her fingers that it might get her somewhere. She was Yasmin Khan, dammit, and she was not going to be marooned on Gallifrey with an insane murderous alien. Yaz flipped a lever and pushed three more buttons just for good measure, and then she hit a bit round button. The TARDIS started wheezing. It sounded more like the Doctor’s TARDIS, actually. Yaz grinned. She closed her eyes and listened, focussing on how, if she really concentrated, she could almost hear the Doctor’s TARDIS. As if it was right outside. _I’m coming to find you, Doctor_. 

~~~

The Doctor set the TARDIS coordinates for Gallifrey. She had a hunch, and her hunches were usually impeccable, if she did say so herself. She felt a surge of confidence rushing through her, glad to be able to wiggle her fingers, stretch her legs and finally do something. They were so close, she could feel it in her ageless bones, and she was so close to that feeling of victory. She knew it. They were almost there. Graham and Ryan were standing in the console room with her, and she felt like the prize was right there dangling just beyond her fingertips. She grinned at her fam, and they shared a look of jubilation. Her self-confidence was oozing off her, and it was leaking into them. They could sense her excitement, the satisfaction of action. Action was the best. The Doctor hated feeling restless and useless. 

The TARDIS groaned and wheezed, but in a happy way, like she too knew that they were on the right track. The Doctor’s fingers tingled in anticipation, feeling triumphant as she pushed the doors wide open and saw a TARDIS. 

The soaring feeling of happiness melted from her expression as she watched it slip away, fading just out of her reach. 

“No, no no, no!” The Doctor yelled, sprinting towards the TARDIS. “You can’t leave! I just found you…” she murmured miserably to the wind. Ryan and Graham ran up to her, eyes searching for something that was no longer there. The Master’s TARDIS was gone. Yasmin Khan had gone with it. She was too late. 

The Doctor sunk to her knees, barely registering the red dust swirling around as she closed her eyes. All the hope and confidence and courage within her had evaporated, and all that was left was a sinking feeling of _too late, too late, too late_. 

“Doctor,” she dimly heard Ryan saying, “It’s okay. You were right, Yaz was here. And if you found her once, you can do it again. We believe in you.”

Graham patted her shoulder. “Chin up, cockle,” he said calmly. He didn’t sound upset, or maybe she was too self-absorbed to hear it. “We’re on the right track. We’ll get her back, I’m sure of it.” The Doctor tried to cling to the certainty in his voice. 

“Come on, Doc, up we get,” Graham said. He gently hoisted her up by the arm. The sky felt too bright for her to look at. She leaned on Graham as they walked slowly back to the TARDIS. Ryan helped her on the other side, and the TARDIS welcomed them back with a small hum of sorrow. 

~~~

Yaz drew a breath as the TARDIS thudded. Eyes darting around to search for the Master, she crept to the door, opened it and shut it fast behind her, hands holding the door closed as if, had he noticed her disappearance, her simple barricade might stop him. She took in her surroundings nervously. They had landed on a planet, thank god, and it seemed to have a stable atmosphere and a healthy amount of oxygen, which she took as a good sign. Yaz dared to hope that maybe the locals were friendly, too. She padded through the dusty, red-brown soil, making her way through hills and little valleys. She wanted to put considerable distance between herself and the Master’s TARDIS, and maybe there would be some technology that she could use, if she found a civilisation, to get home. 

She noted the uncomfortable heat. It was very humid, and the sun seemed a lot bigger than her Earth sun. 

After an hour or so, Yaz noticed a little house in the distance, shimmering in the heat like a mirage. Yaz sprinted up to the little house, noting that it seemed to be in good condition and then registering more houses beyond it. She knocked on the door, and when nobody replied, tried the door. It was unlocked. There didn’t seem to be a lock at all. There was nobody inside. Yaz left the house and went to the little street to see if there was anybody there.

The houses didn’t look human-built, so that ruled out Earth. Yaz’s hope sunk at that. Not that she had thought she would land on Earth, considering how she went savage on the buttons, but a girl could dream. The houses seemed quite… primitive, with quite a lot of surrounding plants and greenery. There were trees surrounding all of the houses, with patches of grass and ferns around the sides. There were no people outside. The street was empty. Not that she could call it much of a street, as there was no road. Just dirt and little plants all over the place, but there was a bit of a path. There were no visible footsteps on it. It looked like it had just worn out. The wind whistled through, and Yaz thought she could even see tumbleweeds. It was all a bit Wild West-y for her, but she kept plodding on, determined to find someone. She heard a door snap shut. Yaz’s ears pricked. 

“Hello?”

“Shhh!”

Yaz whipped her head around to locate the voice. She couldn’t discern where the noise had come from. Then she heard shutters rustling, and saw some hands hastily fastening a window closed. Yaz rushed to the door of their house, rapping her knuckles on the door. 

“Stop! Stop knocking,” a voice whispered furiously. 

“Let me in, please,” Yaz replied politely and firmly. She ceased the knocking. It seemed to be distressing the person inside. 

“I- I can’t! Go away,” the voice replied. 

“Come on! I need to get in, I’m hiding from someone,” Yaz whispered through the door. “If you don’t let me in, they’ll come and get me, and then we’ll both be in trouble.”

The door creaked open ever so slightly. Yaz could see a glimpse of light green eyes and what looked like a curious skin condition before a gloved hand beckoned her in. “Quickly!” 

Yaz slipped in, curious as to the cause of this person’s urgency. The room was quite dark, she noticed. There was hardly any light coming in, and all the windows were shut. “Why is this room so dark?” She asked. 

“It’s better for my eyes,” the person explained hurriedly. “Who are you, what are you doing here, and why do you smell so strange?”

“I’m a human,” Yaz said. 

“You’re a what?” The person asked. Yaz found that a bit weird, seeing as the person’s body was pretty humanoid, in her opinion. Clearly she was wrong. 

“I’m a human,” she repeated. “What year is it?”

“One million, three hundred and twenty thousand and forty-two,” the person replied without missing a beat. “Why don’t you know the year?”

Yaz hesitated. “Well, the person I was with, er, he kidnapped me and brought me to another time period.” 

“Oh, bollocks,” the person swore. “What kind of mess have I gotten myself into this time?” Yaz thought that it was an apt sentiment. 

“What’s your name?” She asked, in an effort to calm the person down.

“Marshivva,” the newly dubbed Marshivva replied. “I’ve lived here for seventy years, and we’ve just been invaded by Prodaks.”

“What? Seventy? You don’t sound seventy,” Yaz replied, confused. 

Marshivva laughed. “Thanks, but I’m not that old.”

“On my planet, seventy is super old. My granny’s in her eighties, and she’s one of the oldest people I know.”

“Really?” Marshivva sounded bemused. Yaz couldn’t see her expression under the dim light. “I’m barely an adult.”

Yaz laughed. “Me too.” 

“What’s your name?” Marshivva asked. 

“Yasmin, but my friends call me Yaz.” Yaz was glad that Marshivva couldn’t see her flinch in the dark. 

“Okay, Yaz.”

Yaz smiled softly. Then she remembered what Marshivva had mentioned before. “Who are the Prodaks?” 

“They’re a highly aggressive warrior species that forages from pre-inhabited planets. They take all the resources for their own, enslave the local population, and leave behind a desert planet when they’re done. They stripped the land of everything, but a group of us ran away before they could notice. This used to be an abandoned village, but only the Silurians knew about it, so they couldn’t get to us by the time we were gone.”

“How long have they been here?” Yaz asked. The planet didn’t seem stripped of all its resources. She had seen trees outside. 

“They haven’t been here very long, only a week and a bit, but they’ve got way more weapons than us. Our colony is made of doctors, agriculturists and scientists. We didn’t have any weapons to fight them back with. The Silurians are a peaceful species. We look after the planet and care for it, and it replenishes our food and sustains us. We never had a need for weapons before the Prodaks came.”

Silurians. Yaz hadn’t heard of them from the Doctor. “If they couldn’t find you, why is everyone hiding in their houses?” Yaz didn’t see why everyone was so fussed if they were safe in the village.

“There are no others. I’m the only one,” Marshivva replied sadly. “This village isn’t impossible to find, it’s just difficult. They have really good detection sensors, which is what makes them easy predators, so if I left the house then they could smell us in the wind and find me.”

“What?! What happened to the rest of your race?” Yaz questioned.

“They were all caught. I was out by myself, out of the city limits. I wasn’t there when the Prodaks landed, but I was close enough to see it happen. They captured my family and my friends, and I left to come here.”

“How have you managed to survive if you can’t go outside?” 

“I took some food with me when I came here,” Marshivva replied sheepishly. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I was reading up on the hills, so I had brought supplies. Not many, but enough to last me a while. I don’t need much food, and I knew that there would be some extra things here, but not enough to last very long. I’ve been building weapons here that I can use when my supplies run out. I’m trying to enforce rations to give myself enough time to build something powerful enough so that when I can go back, I might be able to free my people.”

The back of Yaz’s neck prickled. “Weapons?” She echoed. “What kind of weapons?”

Marshivva was quiet. Then she said: “Can I trust you?”

“Of course you can,” Yaz said. She felt nervous. 

“I’m building a bomb specifically to kill Prodaks,” Marshivva said, like a weight had been lifted off her chest. “It won’t harm my people, we’re reptiles, but the Prodaks are warm-blooded. The bomb will kill any warm-blooded creature. I finished it yesterday, actually. I was making some final touches today, and I was planning to deploy it tomorrow. Maybe you could help me?”

 _Oh, no_ , Yaz thought. She tried to gloss over the fact that Silurians were, apparently, reptilian. She hoped they weren’t green. That would be so cliché. But the bomb meant that she was in danger. Marshivva sounded like she meant business. They couldn’t - Yaz didn’t know if she was able to stay on this planet and help her, if that was her plan. 

“Marshivva, can I trust you?” Yaz asked. 

“Yes, Yaz,” Marshivva replied calmly. “What is it?”

Yaz exhaled, her breath shaking slightly. “I’m a human.”

“I know,” Marshivva said, sounding confused. “You told me.”

“Humans are warm-blooded,” Yaz explained. 

“Oh. Oh, I see.”

“Yeah,” Yaz murmured. 

“Well, this is quite a dilemma,” Marshivva said quietly. “I don’t suppose you can help me anymore.”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Marshivva said in a measured voice. 

“Wait, but - doesn’t that mean that the Prodaks will come here?” Yaz asked. “Won’t they be able to smell me on the wind, like you said?”

“It does.” Yaz couldn’t decipher the emotion behind Marshivva’s voice. “I’m sorry, Yaz, you have to go.”

“But I’ll just be luring them here... “ Yaz trailed off, her mind piecing the clues together. “Oh. Are you - are you going to use the bomb?”

Marshivva didn’t say anything. 

“And you’re using me as bait, killing me in the process,” Yaz said weakly. 

“It’s the only way,” Marshivva said remorsefully. “I need my family, my friends. Everyone I have ever known, everything I love, and you are all that stands in my way.”

Yaz’s lip wobbled. “So I’ll die.” 

“Go. Just go,” Marshivva said, putting her hand on Yaz’s chest and pushing her outside - Yaz felt little bumps all over her hand, and caught a glimpse of a bright green alien face - before she was outside. She heard a latch click. Now she was alone, with nothing to save her. The Master’s TARDIS was too far. She wouldn’t make it before the Prodaks got here, and either they would kill her first or Marshivva’s bomb would. Yaz bet that the Prodaks didn’t take kindly to random humans intruding on their territory. 

She ran through the street, something within her igniting. She didn’t know if it was panic, misery, or anger. “HELP!” She bellowed. Maybe some benevolent god would smile down upon her, or maybe she would merely embrace her death faster. She ran. “HELP ME!” 

Yaz heard a slight rumbling. She didn’t look behind her. She just kept running and yelling for all it was worth. _Please, help me_. 

She yelled one more time, then it felt like her lungs folded in on her and she collapsed to the ground, coughing. She looked behind her. In the far distance, she could see an army of hostile aliens. They were all armed. “Help,” Yaz croaked into the wind.

“YAZ!” 

Yaz lifted her head up, barely processing the image in front of her. The Doctor. Her Doctor. She was running towards her, hair flying in the wind and a frantic look on her face. Her grey coat billowed out behind her and her boots made a _pat-pat_ sound against the sand and dirt. It made Yaz feel warm inside to see her. She didn’t think it was real, it was probably some messed-up last resort of her mind to trick her into a treasonous hope. Nonetheless, Yaz reached out her hand as the Doctor approached her at a sprint. Even her panting breaths sounded quite realistic. She jogged up to Yaz and leaned her face down so Yaz could see right into her shining, endlessly deep brown eyes. Yaz thought they looked pretty real. The Doctor took Yaz’s hand and held on tightly, lifting her up into her arms and carrying her. _Oh. She is real_. It was at this point that Yaz couldn’t remember anything else. She was later told that she had fainted. 

~~~

The Doctor carried Yaz back carefully, despite a bit of a hurried pace, as if she might slip away should the Doctor lose her grip. They hadn’t parked far away, with the TARDIS locking onto Yaz’s bio-signal and having the foresight to be nearby. Thankfully, she hadn’t seen the Master as they got back to the TARDIS. It contrasted wonderfully against the background. The TARDIS was the only blue thing in sight. Everything else was green and brown and a dusty yellowish beige. 

Behind her, Ryan noticed a small figure with a green face staring up at them. He blinked several times to check that that was what he was actually seeing. Not that he should really be surprised after having already met a bunch of aliens who didn’t look remotely like humans, but the sight of a bright green face the colour of the leafy tree outside his Nan’s old house was a bit jarring. The figure waved him off urgently, gesturing to an even smaller group of people in the distance who looked as if they were carrying guns. He nudged Graham and pointed her out to him. “Is it just me, or is that person green?”

Graham squinted. “No, son, I don’t think it’s just you. Cor, can you see that?” His eyes widened at the army of people thundering towards the green person, who wasn’t too far away from them. “Doc, I reckon we should get outta here ASAP.”

“On it, Graham! Ryan, shut the doors,” the Doctor commanded. Ryan did as she said. “I’ve got my hands full. Graham, can you flick that green toggle and push the blue lever?” The TARDIS started whirring excitedly. “Ryan, there’s a little red button right there, next to your left hand. No no that one - yep, that one. There we go,” she sighed in relief as the TARDIS whooshed into the Time Vortex. Just before Graham felt the lift off, he thought he heard a little ‘boom’. “Thank goodness.”

“Doc, there was a green person,” Ryan said. Possibly a girl, but he didn’t want to judge. It was an alien, so maybe they didn’t have a concept of gender and the only gender available was just ‘alien’. He decided on sticking to ‘they’ for the pronouns, though. 

“Really?” For once, the Doctor sounded disinterested, distracted. She was too focussed on the unconscious human in her arms. “Can’t wait to hear all about it later. For now, I’m gonna get Yaz to the medibay and check her vitals.” It was clearly dismissive, and Graham and Ryan shared a look with each other, then silently agreed to go back to the games room and continue playing chess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quarantine is so boring. i've been in my house for five weeks and i am dying on the inside. let me know if you liked the chapter with a kudos/comment!


	9. Chapter 9

The Doctor settled Yaz down delicately on the crisp white bed in the medibay, taking her shoes off and gently tugging the jacket off so that she could slip her into the bed. Poor Yaz. The Doctor found a thermometer and checked her temperature, then her pulse and if all her vital organs were functioning. She would probably know if they weren’t, but it never hurt to check. Yaz was sweating a bit and her hands felt clammy as the Doctor checked her pulse, but she had noticed that outside it had been really hot. She hadn't looked around long enough to check which planet it was - as soon as she had seen her friend, she had sprinted all the way to the finish line. Her first priority was getting Yaz to safety, and there wasn't anything bad that could happen to her while Yaz was in the TARDIS with the Doctor. She didn’t feel triumphant now, though, or any of the victorious elation that she had felt before. She just felt worried, and tired. Yaz looked pale as she lay down on the pillow with her eyes closed and a tiny frown on her face. Her pulse was a bit higher than usual, about 100 BPM, which indicated stress, and there was also the fainting. That was probably a good sign. Well, not good, that was to say. Not good at all. The Doctor grabbed a chair and sat down beside her friend, biting her lip. She looked at Yaz silently, watching the slow rise and fall of Yaz's chest. “I’m so glad I’ve got you back now,” she said, taking Yaz’s hand and stroking it with her thumb. “You’re gonna be alright,” she whispered. “Everything is going to be fine.” 

The Doctor held onto Yaz’s hand and leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. She hadn't been certain that it would be fine. She still wasn’t certain. She had lost so many people - humans made death look so easy, almost like an art to slip away into the nothingness - and she hadn’t been totally sure that her daft plans would work. Yaz was so fragile, just like any other human, and that fleeting fear that the Doctor might be fallible, that she might have taken it too far this time, that the mistakes and consequences would be irreversible and irredeemable had been all-consuming. It was so easy to believe that she was doing the right thing. Actually doing the right thing was a whole other ordeal entirely. She just hoped that Yaz wouldn’t wake up and regret it. She hated the regret. There were so many people that the Doctor had lost - to death, to monsters, to their own freedom, but a tiny, horrible, selfish part of her thought that it was worse when she lost them because they regretted travelling with her. Because then it was her fault - not the Daleks, not the Cybermen, she couldn’t do her self-righteous spiel about weapons - the one person left to blame was her. And the Doctor had a terrible track record of dealing with blame. 

The team structure had never been flat. Stratosphere was putting it lightly. 

Yaz stirred. The Doctor’s attention zoomed back to her. Yaz’s breathing seemed fine, if a bit raspy, and she opened her eyes slowly, blinking at the bright lights in the medibay before her eyes found the Doctor. 

Yaz sighed with relief. “Hi, Doctor,” she said softly. 

“Hey, Yaz,” the Doctor replied, matching her tone of voice. “You doing alright? I was a bit worried there.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Yaz murmured. “All my bones are still working, and I think I’ve got a bit of a stitch, but that’s the worst of it.” 

The Doctor nodded in satisfaction. “Good.”

Yaz looked at her for a long, quiet moment. “Are you really here? You’re not - you’re not in my head or anything are you?” She sounded anxious. 

The Doctor rubbed her thumb against Yaz’s palm. “Of course I’m here,” she smiled. 

Yaz nodded in an act of self-reassurance. “Right, good. That’s good.” Her eyes fluttered shut. “I thought you might’ve been an apparition or something, I don’t know, it

“Feeling sleepy, are we, Yaz?” The Doctor teased lightly. Yaz flapped a hand at her dismissively, her eyes still shut. The Doctor smirked. “Alright, I’ll get a cuppa.”

The Doctor grabbed some tea while Yaz drifted off into the land of dreams once again, and hoped that she’d feel better when Yaz woke up. Yaz, of course. But her too. She had a bit of a headache. The Doctor turned the kettle on and climbed up onto the kitchen counter. She hadn’t really known what to do with a kitchen, but the TARDIS knew, so she had a large black counter that shone like a rainbow when there was light reflecting off it. The humans had wanted somewhere to properly sit, which was why they had gone shopping (and wasn’t that the most chaotic trip the humans had ever had) and they had gotten some actual chairs. Swivel chairs, in fact. Much better than regular chairs. She had wanted to get bright banana-yellow swivel chairs, but Ryan said that would “kill the vibes” and they had gotten blue ones instead (but the Doctor had snuck back and gotten the banana chairs and put them in a random storage room because they were the best and she needed to be able to swivel around in an empty room holding a banana in one hand and eating a banana in the other hand while getting dizzy on her banana chair. It was brilliant). The Doctor wasn’t very good at chairs. She found that they restrained her nature. Meaning that, whenever she sat upside down in one of them with her feet dangling off the top and a book raised above her head, the humans would look at her funny. So the Doctor had sat on the counter instead, because it was big and she was able to stretch on it. The humans had still looked at her funny, but the Doctor had huffed about never being able to please them and stuck to the counter.

The Doctor grabbed an Agatha Christie novel (And Then There Were None; the Doctor had read it before, but it was the one book where she hadn’t seen the ending coming, and it was therefore immensely valuable to her - also, she had gotten it signed aaaaages ago when Donna wasn’t looking because it was Agatha Freaking Christie and Donna would think she was a dork if she asked for a signed copy) and settled down on the counter, pushing her legs up so her boots touched the ceiling and her back lay on the countertop, and read to the immensely calming sound of the kettle boiling. 

She was almost up to the bit where everyone got to Indian Island when the kettle started blaring Elvis Presley and she knew the tea was ready (it was another nifty setting she’d put in; the kettle could do everything in the rock’n’roll genre and jazz, and a couple of Ed Sheeran songs). It was the same kettle that she had put the flavours in back on the other TARDIS - she was going to call it Housey, because it was a house that deserved a capital H - and she had taken it from Ravio, Ethan and Yedlarmi. She hoped they didn’t mind. She had also repainted it canary yellow. Without asking Ryan whether her colour choices appeased his “vibe”. 

The Doctor had gotten the tea flavour that she had made for Yaz. She poured an extra mug of it, just in case, and put mittens on to carry them, because in the thousands of years that she had lived, the number one cause of injury was either picking up a cup of tea when it was too hot, touching a boiling kettle, steam burns, sipping the tea when it was just out, and many other tea-related incidents. It was chaotic, and so the Doctor had bought her own tea mittens, which were extremely good insulators and also had a smiling cat on it. Ryan had shown her this thing called a “polite cat meme” after she’d apparently made that particular face a bunch of times, and so she had put the cat face on her mittens because she thought it looked like a pretty cute cat. 

The Doctor carefully carried the mugs back to the medibay, yelling in the general direction of Graham and Ryan that the kettle had just boiled, if they wanted any, and continuing on the treacherous journey of carrying the tea without letting it spill. The tea was wobbling precariously in its cup, and the Doctor had definitely poured more than the regulated amount of tea in a single mug, but it was too late. She tiptoed into the little white room, placing the mugs down with trepidation on the bedside table and letting out a breath that she didn’t realise she was holding when none of it spilled, or woke Yaz up, or burned either of them. Fabulous. 

Come to think of it, the Doctor felt awfully tired. She tried to settle in the chair she’d dragged over earlier, but sitting in it sideways didn’t seem to be working, and upside-down just seemed downright impractical in a medibay. She yawned and rubbed her eyes with her mitten-clad hands. Her mittens were so soft. The Doctor held the mittens up to her face and rubbed them on her cheeks as she yawned again and again. She couldn’t stop thinking about yawning. Yaz’s bed looked so comfy. The Doctor wondered if she - no, she shouldn’t do that, that was a stupid idea - but oh it looked _so comfy_ and if she only took up a bit of the bed, she was sure Yaz wouldn’t mind. The Doctor scooted into the bed next to Yaz, mittens subconsciously coming up to wrap around Yaz’s waist. The Doctor burrowed into the bed and Yaz’s neck, feeling a lot happier now that she was warm and cozy. And this way, she would know where Yaz was, and Yaz wouldn’t be able to be kidnapped again and she’d be safe. The Doctor dozed off, her train of thought going round in circles of Yaz and yawning before it fell off the tracks entirely and she was finally asleep. 

~~~ 

Ryan was playing chess with Graham when the Doctor flew past them with a sideways shout of “Kettle’s on, cuppa!” as she zoomed past them at her usual breakneck speed. He didn’t understand any of that, but Graham seemed to get the gist, and popped up to get some more Earl Grey. Ryan thought Early Grey was just overrated leaf soup like the rest of the tea world, but more overrated and more leafy soup. Nevertheless, he trailed after Graham and they found the kettle on the bench, having already been boiled and put on a setting labelled _Yaz_. Graham shrugged and poured himself some anyway. “D’you want some too, son?” He asked Ryan. 

“Alright,” Ryan said. He was still a bit wary of the Doctor’s tea brews, but it smelled alright. He accepted the cup that Graham gave to him and tried a bit. It tasted pretty good, but he still preferred coffee. Graham seemed to like it, though. 

“Mind you, I’d rather have Earl Grey,” he whispered to Ryan. 

Ryan frowned. “Why are we whispering? And why are we going in this direction? Are you going senile in your old age, Gramps? The game room’s that way.” 

“Oi, shut up about my age,” Graham said with no bite to his words. “We’re going this way ‘cause I reckon that the Doctor and Yaz are asleep. The Doc looked like me when I’m cranky and need a nap, but she probably thought she needed tea instead. I don’t think she’s very good at looking after herself.” They tiptoed in the TARDIS hallway, although since she was such an intelligent entity she could probably have made their footsteps completely silent, but Graham and Ryan were content with tiptoeing. 

They got to the medibay, and Ryan was surprised to see that Graham’s predictions were entirely accurate. The Doc and Yaz looked like a couple of snoozing pandas. The Doctor had her head in the crook of Yaz’s neck, and Yaz had turned a bit to face her, so that their feet were entwined and one of Yaz’s arms was laying on the Doctor’s waist. “Are you psychic or something?” He asked Graham. 

“Yes I am, son,” Graham said smugly. “Yes, I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys, i haven't posted in a while. sorry about that. i've been feeling a bit depressed in quarantine because my friends don't talk much, and i didn't see any new comments so i felt unmotivated. if you like my story please let me know, because seeing someone comment on my work makes my day. i hope y'all are doing alright at home <3


	10. Chapter 10

The Doctor settled Yaz down delicately on the crisp white bed in the medibay, taking her shoes off and gently tugging the jacket off so that she could slip her into the bed. Poor Yaz. The Doctor found a thermometer and checked her temperature, then her pulse and if all her vital organs were functioning. She would probably know if they weren’t, but it never hurt to check. Yaz was sweating a bit and her hands felt clammy as the Doctor checked her pulse, but she had noticed that outside it had been really hot. She hadn't looked around long enough to check which planet it was - as soon as she had seen her friend, she had sprinted all the way to the finish line. Her first priority was getting Yaz to safety, and there wasn't anything bad that could happen to her while Yaz was in the TARDIS with the Doctor. She didn’t feel triumphant now, though, or any of the victorious elation that she had felt before. She just felt worried, and tired. Yaz looked pale as she lay down on the pillow with her eyes closed and a tiny frown on her face. Her pulse was a bit higher than usual, about 100 BPM, which indicated stress, and there was also the fainting. That was probably a good sign. Well, not good, that was to say. Not good at all. The Doctor grabbed a chair and sat down beside her friend, biting her lip. She looked at Yaz silently, watching the slow rise and fall of Yaz's chest. “I’m so glad I’ve got you back now,” she said, taking Yaz’s hand and stroking it with her thumb. “You’re gonna be alright,” she whispered. “Everything is going to be fine.” 

The Doctor held onto Yaz’s hand and leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. She hadn't been certain that it would be fine. She still wasn’t certain. She had lost so many people - humans made death look so easy, almost like an art to slip away into the nothingness - and she hadn’t been totally sure that her daft plans would work. Yaz was so fragile, just like any other human, and that fleeting fear that the Doctor might be fallible, that she might have taken it too far this time, that the mistakes and consequences would be irreversible and irredeemable had been all-consuming. It was so easy to believe that she was doing the right thing. Actually doing the right thing was a whole other ordeal entirely. She just hoped that Yaz wouldn’t wake up and regret it. She hated the regret. There were so many people that the Doctor had lost - to death, to monsters, to their own freedom, but a tiny, horrible, selfish part of her thought that it was worse when she lost them because they regretted travelling with her. Because then it was her fault - not the Daleks, not the Cybermen, she couldn’t do her self-righteous spiel about weapons - the one person left to blame was her. And the Doctor had a terrible track record of dealing with blame. 

The team structure had never been flat. Stratosphere was putting it lightly. 

Yaz stirred. The Doctor’s attention zoomed back to her. Yaz’s breathing seemed fine, if a bit raspy, and she opened her eyes slowly, blinking at the bright lights in the medibay before her eyes found the Doctor. 

Yaz sighed with relief. “Hi, Doctor,” she said softly. 

“Hey, Yaz,” the Doctor replied, matching her tone of voice. “You doing alright? I was a bit worried there.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Yaz murmured. “All my bones are still working, and I think I’ve got a bit of a stitch, but that’s the worst of it.” 

The Doctor nodded in satisfaction. “Good.”

Yaz looked at her for a long, quiet moment. “Are you really here? You’re not - you’re not in my head or anything are you?” She sounded anxious. 

The Doctor rubbed her thumb against Yaz’s palm. “Of course I’m here,” she smiled. 

Yaz nodded in an act of self-reassurance. “Right, good. That’s good.” Her eyes fluttered shut. “I thought you might’ve been an apparition or something, I don’t know, it

“Feeling sleepy, are we, Yaz?” The Doctor teased lightly. Yaz flapped a hand at her dismissively, her eyes still shut. The Doctor smirked. “Alright, I’ll get a cuppa.”

The Doctor grabbed some tea while Yaz drifted off into the land of dreams once again, and hoped that she’d feel better when Yaz woke up. Yaz, of course. But her too. She had a bit of a headache. The Doctor turned the kettle on and climbed up onto the kitchen counter. She hadn’t really known what to do with a kitchen, but the TARDIS knew, so she had a large black counter that shone like a rainbow when there was light reflecting off it. The humans had wanted somewhere to properly sit, which was why they had gone shopping (and wasn’t that the most chaotic trip the humans had ever had) and they had gotten some actual chairs. Swivel chairs, in fact. Much better than regular chairs. She had wanted to get bright banana-yellow swivel chairs, but Ryan said that would “kill the vibes” and they had gotten blue ones instead (but the Doctor had snuck back and gotten the banana chairs and put them in a random storage room because they were the best and she needed to be able to swivel around in an empty room holding a banana in one hand and eating a banana in the other hand while getting dizzy on her banana chair. It was brilliant). The Doctor wasn’t very good at chairs. She found that they restrained her nature. Meaning that, whenever she sat upside down in one of them with her feet dangling off the top and a book raised above her head, the humans would look at her funny. So the Doctor had sat on the counter instead, because it was big and she was able to stretch on it. The humans had still looked at her funny, but the Doctor had huffed about never being able to please them and stuck to the counter.

The Doctor grabbed an Agatha Christie novel (And Then There Were None; the Doctor had read it before, but it was the one book where she hadn’t seen the ending coming, and it was therefore immensely valuable to her - also, she had gotten it signed aaaaages ago when Donna wasn’t looking because it was Agatha Freaking Christie and Donna would think she was a dork if she asked for a signed copy) and settled down on the counter, pushing her legs up so her boots touched the ceiling and her back lay on the countertop, and read to the immensely calming sound of the kettle boiling. 

She was almost up to the bit where everyone got to Indian Island when the kettle started blaring Elvis Presley and she knew the tea was ready (it was another nifty setting she’d put in; the kettle could do everything in the rock’n’roll genre and jazz, and a couple of Ed Sheeran songs). It was the same kettle that she had put the flavours in back on the other TARDIS - she was going to call it Housey, because it was a house that deserved a capital H - and she had taken it from Ravio, Ethan and Yedlarmi. She hoped they didn’t mind. She had also repainted it canary yellow. Without asking Ryan whether her colour choices appeased his “vibe”. 

The Doctor had gotten the tea flavour that she had made for Yaz. She poured an extra mug of it, just in case, and put mittens on to carry them, because in the thousands of years that she had lived, the number one cause of injury was either picking up a cup of tea when it was too hot, touching a boiling kettle, steam burns, sipping the tea when it was just out, and many other tea-related incidents. It was chaotic, and so the Doctor had bought her own tea mittens, which were extremely good insulators and also had a smiling cat on it. Ryan had shown her this thing called a “polite cat meme” after she’d apparently made that particular face a bunch of times, and so she had put the cat face on her mittens because she thought it looked like a pretty cute cat. 

The Doctor carefully carried the mugs back to the medibay, yelling in the general direction of Graham and Ryan that the kettle had just boiled, if they wanted any, and continuing on the treacherous journey of carrying the tea without letting it spill. The tea was wobbling precariously in its cup, and the Doctor had definitely poured more than the regulated amount of tea in a single mug, but it was too late. She tiptoed into the little white room, placing the mugs down with trepidation on the bedside table and letting out a breath that she didn’t realise she was holding when none of it spilled, or woke Yaz up, or burned either of them. Fabulous. 

Come to think of it, the Doctor felt awfully tired. She tried to settle in the chair she’d dragged over earlier, but sitting in it sideways didn’t seem to be working, and upside-down just seemed downright impractical in a medibay. She yawned and rubbed her eyes with her mitten-clad hands. Her mittens were so soft. The Doctor held the mittens up to her face and rubbed them on her cheeks as she yawned again and again. She couldn’t stop thinking about yawning. Yaz’s bed looked so comfy. The Doctor wondered if she - no, she shouldn’t do that, that was a stupid idea - but oh it looked _so comfy_ and if she only took up a bit of the bed, she was sure Yaz wouldn’t mind. The Doctor scooted into the bed next to Yaz, mittens subconsciously coming up to wrap around Yaz’s waist. The Doctor burrowed into the bed and Yaz’s neck, feeling a lot happier now that she was warm and cozy. And this way, she would know where Yaz was, and Yaz wouldn’t be able to be kidnapped again and she’d be safe. The Doctor dozed off, her train of thought going round in circles of Yaz and yawning before it fell off the tracks entirely and she was finally asleep. 

~~~ 

Ryan was playing chess with Graham when the Doctor flew past them with a sideways shout of “Kettle’s on, cuppa!” as she zoomed past them at her usual breakneck speed. He didn’t understand any of that, but Graham seemed to get the gist, and popped up to get some more Earl Grey. Ryan thought Early Grey was just overrated leaf soup like the rest of the tea world, but more overrated and more leafy soup. Nevertheless, he trailed after Graham and they found the kettle on the bench, having already been boiled and put on a setting labelled _Yaz_. Graham shrugged and poured himself some anyway. “D’you want some too, son?” He asked Ryan. 

“Alright,” Ryan said. He was still a bit wary of the Doctor’s tea brews, but it smelled alright. He accepted the cup that Graham gave to him and tried a bit. It tasted pretty good, but he still preferred coffee. Graham seemed to like it, though. 

“Mind you, I’d rather have Earl Grey,” he whispered to Ryan. 

Ryan frowned. “Why are we whispering? And why are we going in this direction? Are you going senile in your old age, Gramps? The game room’s that way.” 

“Oi, shut up about my age,” Graham said with no bite to his words. “We’re going this way ‘cause I reckon that the Doctor and Yaz are asleep. The Doc looked like me when I’m cranky and need a nap, but she probably thought she needed tea instead. I don’t think she’s very good at looking after herself.” They tiptoed in the TARDIS hallway, although since she was such an intelligent entity she could probably have made their footsteps completely silent, but Graham and Ryan were content with tiptoeing. 

They got to the medibay, and Ryan was surprised to see that Graham’s predictions were entirely accurate. The Doc and Yaz looked like a couple of snoozing pandas. The Doctor had her head in the crook of Yaz’s neck, and Yaz had turned a bit to face her, so that their feet were entwined and one of Yaz’s arms was laying on the Doctor’s waist. “Are you psychic or something?” He asked Graham. 

“Yes I am, son,” Graham said smugly. “Yes, I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys, i haven't posted in a while. sorry about that. i've been feeling a bit depressed in quarantine because my friends don't talk much, and i didn't see any new comments so i felt unmotivated. if you like my story please let me know, because seeing someone comment on my work makes my day. i hope y'all are doing alright at home <3


	11. Shopping Trip!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is a flashback from before that's going to be context for the next chapter, where the doctor and the fam all go to space ikea (but they don't get swedish meatballs :(()

The Doctor whined, throwing her head back and scrunching up her nose. “Why do we need to go shopping?”

“Because there is absolutely no furniture in that TARDIS of yours, Doc, and frankly if I don’t have an armchair to snooze in when I need to snooze, someone is going to pay,” Graham said semi-threateningly. He had had a terrible sleep after accidentally napping in an obscure piece of furniture shaped like a giant pear that the Doctor claimed was from fifteenth-century Prague, which Graham wouldn't have believed for a second even if it wasn't a garish yellow. He had such a ferocious crick in his neck that he'd been complaining about his joints all morning. 

“Chairs are just an excuse to not stand up,” the Doctor declared. “Besides, chairs make you shorter. I’m already short enough in this regeneration, I don’t need any more reason for other people to be taller than me.”

“It’s not that bad, being short,” Ryan commented. 

“You say that, but you’re towering above all of us, you tosser,” Yaz said indignantly. 

“Don’t hate on the tall guys!” Ryan said defensively. “It’s not my fault I’m genetically astounding.”

“Oh, cram it, you lot,” Graham snapped as they walked into the shop. It was giant homeware and hardware store that the TARDIS had taken them to because the Doctor didn't actually know many decent shops and the TARDIS was being insolent and not putting them on Earth - Yaz was convinced that it was because she sympathised with Graham too much. It always took him less time to find rooms in the TARDIS, and a few times Yaz had been wandering around hopelessly for as long as an hour before the TARDIS had finally let up. It was a nightmare whenever she needed the bathroom. Yaz was completely certain that if at any point they lost the Doctor, she would come back with four spanners, another welding helmet, a sonic drill, and a septicycle. Yaz kept a watchful eye on the Doctor as she took in the shop with an unimpressed once-over. 

“Why do you humans need all this stuff?” The Doctor asked. “I mean, look over there,” she pointed at a shelf of fake plants. “Why would you need fake plants? What’s the point? Real plants give you oxygen and actually live, it’s like getting a robot dog,” she complained, then immediately realised her mistake. “Not that I have anything against robot dogs! I love robot dogs. It’s like getting a plastic dog that can’t move around,” she amended. 

The others looked at her suspiciously. It sounded like she had a bit of a history with robot dogs. They did not want to know. “Where were the chairs you wanted to get, Ryan?” Yaz tactfully changed the subject. 

“They’re over this way,” Ryan replied, pointing to aisle 14. 

“Why do they need fourteen aisles?” The Doctor asked as they perused the chair section. “How can there possibly be fourteen categories of things? All you need is things, and things you put on things. And maybe things you put under things.”

“What about things you put through things?” Yaz suggested. 

The Doctor clicked her fingers in finger guns. “Exactly! Ten points to Yaz.” Yaz quietly felt very pleased with herself. Ryan sniggered at her, and also at the Doctor’s finger guns. 

“Actually, there are seventy-eight aisles,” Graham piped up. 

The Doctor gaped at him with an open mouth. “No way,” she stared in amazement. "That's ridiculous, even for humans."

“Yes way,” Graham said with amusement, politely ignoring the jab. “It’s a hardware store, they need heaps of space to put all the stuff. Actually, seventy-eight aisles isn’t that many.”

“What?!” The Doctor squawked inelegantly. “Seventy-eight aisles isn’t that many? That’s balderdash!”

“How else do you think they fit all the chairs?” Ryan asked. 

“Maybe the shop is bigger on the inside,” the Doctor muttered conspiratorially, with a glint in her eye. 

Graham led them to the chair section, where the Doctor’s attention was promptly stolen by swivel chairs. Graham had been hoping for something less… dizziness-inducing, but Ryan and Yaz looked pretty excited at the prospect of swivel chairs so Graham resigned himself to a future of chaotic chairs that would probably make him a bit nauseous. As they wandered through the aisle, Graham looked longingly at the normal, regular chairs, with four legs that didn’t go round and round like a bloody carnival ride. He decided to drag everyone to the armchair section after they had gotten off their swivel-chair highs, so he could save himself some proper sensible chairs that were, above all, comfortable. If they got swivel chairs, he could still make do with a plush armchair that sunk when he sat in it like he was resting on clouds. 

“Can we get yellow swivel chairs?” The Doctor suggested. She pointed energetically at a chair that was so yellow, it was approaching neon, and had little antlers reaching out the side that weren't made from actual antlers but looked like, in a parallel universe, they might be arms. It had the Doctor written all over it. 

“No,” Ryan said shortly. “That’s absolutely naff.”

The Doctor slumped. “Cheer up, Doctor, we can get some other yellow swivel chairs,” Yaz tried to comfort her. “Just maybe not those ones, they looked a bit peaky.”

The Doctor scrunched her nose. “How can a chair look peaky?”

“‘Cause it looks like vomit, Doc,” Graham supplied helpfully. Yaz glared at him, and patted the Doctor’s back as she looked like someone had taken away her Christmas presents. 

“Why does this shop even have a swivel chair section? Who needs that many swivel chairs?” The Doctor asked. “Can’t they just have a general chair section? Do they have the same things for tables? Who’s running this place? I still don’t understand why there are fourteen aisles,” she muttered the last bit. 

“Wait till you see the extra gardening section outside,” Graham said. 

“Can we get flowers? I’m good at gardening,” the Doctor said. Yaz raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I haven’t done any gardening in like, a couple thousand years, but back in the day I was awesome at gardening. Spiffing gardener, me. I even won a prize! For gardening! Little leaf trophy because I grew the biggest watermelon. Watermelons are the best,” the Doctor grinned. Yaz laughed at her. 

“Watermelons are the best,” she agreed.

“Wanna have some watermelon later? I think I’ve got some… somewhere,” the Doctor trailed off. “Actually, no I don’t. Someone ate them. Can’t remember who. Can we buy some watermelons later? Wait, of course we can, we’re in a shop! Do they sell watermelons here?” She questioned.

“...It’s a home and hardware store,” Ryan said dryly. “Watermelons aren’t exactly home or hardware.”

“You can use watermelons in a home!” The Doctor argued. “Give me a couple of watermelons, and half an hour later you can have a new green lamp!”

“Can we get some other stuff, or are we only getting chairs?” Yaz asked. 

“Also, how are we going to pay for all this? Cause I didn’t bring much cash,” Graham said, “And by the looks of it we’re going to end up with a lot more stuff than we bargained for, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that!” The Doctor said cheerfully. She didn’t elaborate. 

“Can we just get these swivel chairs?” Ryan asked, pointing to some sensible chairs that were sky-blue and had backs to lean on, which was more than the Doctors’ ones had had. 

“Sure! We can buy as much as you like, fam,” the Doctor said. “Go wild!” 

Ryan loaded four of the blue chairs into the tiny forklift-like trolley that they had brought. “Alright, should we split up? Divide and conquer?”

“D’you wanna come to the gardening section with me, Yaz?” The Doctor asked her hopefully. 

Yaz sighed. “Fine, but after that we need to go to the hygiene section, because I need some more shampoo and we don’t have any bath bombs on the TARDIS.”

“Alright!” The Doctor started leading Yaz outside at a speedy pace that Graham did not want to match with Ryan.

“Where do you want to go, Gramps?” Ryan asked. 

“Oh, I need to get me some of them little homey things, you know,” Graham said. “All those little trinkets and stuff that brighten up the place.”

“And I want to go to the hardware section and grab a couple of helmets,” Ryan said. “I get paranoid every time we go out and run around that someone’s going to bump their head on some alien rock and get a concussion or something. It’s bloody terrifying.”

~~~

“Yaz, d’you know what this is?” The Doctor asked, holding up a bag of little seeds. 

“Uh… seeds?” Yaz guessed. She cringed inwardly at her own social inability to function when she was on her own with the Doctor. 

“Yep! Not just any seeds, though. These are gazania seeds!” The Doctor said excitedly. 

“What are gazania seeds?” Yaz humoured her.

“They’re these seeds that come from South Africa - they must’ve been imported here - and they’re sooooo pretty, they look super cool, can we please get them?” The Doctor pleaded. 

“Why do you need gazania seeds?” Yaz asked. 

The Doctor spluttered. “Because - because they look nice! They’re colourful an’ all that! Come on, Yaz,” the Doctor groaned. “Stop interrogating me!”

“Alright! We can get your gazania seeds, if you really want them that much.” 

The Doctor smiled widely and grabbed seven packets. Yaz looked on doubtfully. 

“Oh!” The Doctor exclaimed, spotting something in the distance. She dragged Yaz by the hand down another aisle, stopping in front of a collection of several blue and red bicycles. 

“Doctor…” Yaz said warningly. “Don’t destroy any of the shop’s products. They’ll arrest us for vandalism or something, and then we won’t be able to buy the chairs, or your flowers.”

“I’m not going to do anything bad to it, I promise,” the Doctor said. She dropped everything she was holding (which at the moment wasn’t much), and clambered over to the bicycles, pulling them off the stands that they had been placed on before going into Mechanic Mode, tearing bits of bicycle off and flinging them about her, as Yaz looked on in a kind of horror-induced fascination. 

“Doctor!” Yaz hissed. “We’ll get arrested!”

“It’ll be fine!” The Doctor insisted. “I can fix up the security cameras later, and when they find the surprise of their lives waiting in the bicycle section, I bet they’ll be really pleased!”

Yaz did not think that the shop people would be really pleased to find whatever the Doctor was inventing. She was a bit panicky, actually. She had never been arrested before. Hell, she was a police officer, and she was just standing here watching her friend who was definitely committing a crime. But the Doctor did say she was going to wipe the security cameras later, and Yaz wasn’t in her police uniform now… so what if she just let the Doctor do her stuff? It wasn’t like she would build a giant sword out of bicycles. Except she didn’t say that out loud because she really did not want to give the Doctor any ideas. 

“Where’s my welding helmet?” The Doctor said. She looked around her as if expecting her welding helmet to just pop up out of nowhere. “Oh, bother, now I’ll have to improvise.”

“I thought you were already improvising?” Yaz asked. “Doesn’t randomly grabbing a couple of bicycles in the middle of a shop count as improvising?”

“Nah,” the Doctor said. “But if I don’t have a welding helmet, I’ll have to make do with something else.” She jogged off suddenly, and for a moment Yaz thought she might have to deal with the bicycle-shaped mess in front of her on her own. Thankfully, the Doctor came jogging back a few seconds later with skiing goggles in her hands. She used that as makeshift welding goggles and continued to get right back to work. 

Ten minutes later, the Doctor stood up triumphantly. “Look!” She said excitedly, taking off the skiing goggles and brandishing them at a bicycle that was… long. Very long. 

“What is it?” Yaz asked, biting her lip. 

“A septicycle!” The Doctor said proudly. “I’ve just invented the septicycle.” 

“Now we need to hide it,” Yaz said. “Otherwise, if the shop people come across a random septicycle, they will definitely be suspicious. And we also need to hack the security cameras.” That should not have felt fun to say, but Yaz felt a small adrenaline rush despite herself. 

Another ten minutes later, the first septicycle to ever have been invented was hidden in the basement of a giant shop where it would hopefully not be found for a really long time, and Yasmin Khan had committed her first-ever criminal offense. She felt mostly horrified, but also a tiny bit smug. Sonya had always told her that she was too much of a goody-two-shoes to ever do anything illegal. 

“Can we go to the soap section now? I need some soaps,” Yaz said. 

“Sure! I want some soaps too.” The Doctor was not very good at remembering to get soaps on the very few times she went shopping. Usually, the sole perpetrator of her decent hygiene was the TARDIS, but the TARDIS’s soaps weren’t quite as good as the real thing. She also needed shampoo and conditioner. Washing her hair in this regeneration was becoming so much more of a chore than it had been in her last regenerations. There was so much more hair, and for some unfathomable reason, she had to wash it a lot more often otherwise her hair would get all lanky and greasy. It was rubbish. The Doctor didn’t understand how half the population of Earth put up with all of it, and didn’t just cut their hair off. Still, she figured that her hair was better than (God forbid) long hair. She had seen some people with _really_ long hair on their trips, on Earth and off it, and the Doctor had decided that she wanted absolutely no part in that and was going to take a pair of scissors to her hair every time she noticed it getting remotely longer. She couldn’t handle all that maintenance. 

Yaz led her to a little area full of little pastel-coloured things that the Doctor was utterly bemused by. “Why do you need all this stuff? What’s it for? This is worse than the chair section,” she grumbled. 

“This,” Yaz pointed to one spot full of large-ish tubes, “is the shampoos. That,” she pointed slightly to the right of the shampoos, “is the conditioners. Then this, that and that,” she pointed to little tubes, round containers and small rectangles, “are the hand creams, face creams and soaps.” 

“Oh! Soaps! Isn’t that what you wanted?” 

“Yep,” Yaz replied, grabbing a couple of purple rectangles. 

“What are the face creams for?” 

“You put them on your face.”

“Why?”

“To make it softer, or sometimes to smooth away wrinkles.”

“Eurgh. I don’t like wrinkles. Had enough of them back when I was Scottish, I’m a bit sick of them now. What are the hand creams for, then?”

“Same thing, except not for wrinkles.”

The Doctor sighed. “Why are there so many… things?” She gestured aggressively at all the tubes and containers. 

Yaz laughed. “Just wait ‘till you see the cosmetics section. I need to get some lipstick too.”

~~~

After Ryan had stacked up on bike helmets (which Graham suspected was also because whenever they went out and he tried to cycle, he would often end up losing his helmet somewhere in the scuffle between him and his bicycle), they went down another aisle, where Graham was finding many little things that fascinated him. Ryan explained to him what a fidget spinner was, although he also mentioned it was a “dead meme” which Graham didn’t understand, but accepted nonetheless. 

“What’s this, then?” Graham held up a pink squishy ball that had a thin black netting covering it. Ryan took it and squeezed it hard, so that the pink stuff squished through the net and turned yellow. “Cor, blimey!” Graham said in surprise.

“It’s a stress ball,” Ryan laughed. “You squeeze it and the stuff comes out.” He did it again, and Graham shuddered. 

“Alright, put that down, it looks horrible. What about that?” Graham pointed to a container filled with tiny bands. 

Ryan groaned. “Oh, jeez, that’s so old. Those are called loom bands. You put them together to make bracelets and stuff. They’re ancient, I can’t believe the people here sell ‘em.” 

“When are they from, then?”

“About 2016,” Ryan replied. 

“Oi! 2016? Ancient?” Graham repeated, incensed. 

“I mean, 2016 was ages ago, you’ve gotta admit,” Ryan said, but he was smirking. 

“Oh, come off it, you ninny,” Graham said, elbowing him. Ryan pouted, but dodged his elbow easily. 

“Come on, let’s get back to the Doc and Yaz,” Graham said. 

“Sure. But first, can I grab a couple of fidget spinners?”

“I thought you said they were fed memes, or something?” Graham asked suspiciously. 

Ryan groaned. “Dead memes, Gramps, dead memes. And they are, but that doesn’t mean they’re not cool. It just means they’re not trendy anymore. Fortnite is where it’s at.”

“Cor, don’t tell me about that one,” Graham muttered.

~~~

The Doctor and Yaz met up with Graham and Ryan near the checkouts, all four carrying things. Ryan was still wheeling the trolley with the chairs on it, but Graham had grabbed an armchair as they made their way back because he didn’t want to forget and then have to sit in the dodgy swivel chairs. He had also grabbed a couple of pillows, because the Doc had said that the price was all under control, and Graham prioritised his own comfort. 

“Hiya, fam!” The Doctor said. “What’ve you got there?” She didn’t wait for them to answer before continuing, “Me and Yaz got a bunch of stuff! I found out what chapstick was today, didn’t I Yaz? Much better than lipstick, I reckon, and it smells like strawberries! Best thing ever. Apart from avocados. Avocados are awesome. I reckon, if I had to list the top five greatest things, it would be bananas, then avocados, then chapstick, then Elton John, then Kinder Surprises. And at the bottom of the list would be pears.” The Doctor wrinkled her nose. “I hate pears.”

A few more tangents later, the gang ended up at the checkout, with their giant trolley in front of a youngish, tired-looking twenty-something who looked like she had been standing around for hours talking to boring people about boring things. God knows how the Doctor would fare in customer service. It seemed to have a bit of a bad rep, but it would probably be a lot like that one time she worked in a toy store. Except at least the toy store had had kids. And toys. And the Doctor had a name tag so she could remember who she (he - they?) was. Customer service didn’t have toys. She would probably get super distracted in less than five minutes. Maybe she could invent something to pass the time! Still, better not. Nobody deserved to deal with her when she was busy trying to invent something. Except for Yaz, 'cause Yaz was cool and helped her cover it up. The Doctor whirled in like a tornado, placing her elbows on the counter and looking up at the lady with her giant eyes. “Hi! I’m the Doctor! What’s your name?” She held out her hand. 

The lady looked at it as if considering that it may be infected, but she reluctantly took it. “Abby,” she replied. 

“Abby! That’s a marvellous name. How are you doing, Abby?” The Doctor shook Abby’s hand vivaciously. Abby’s afro vibrated as the Doctor shook her hand. Yaz grimaced.

“Er… I’m alright, I s’pose,” Abby mumbled. “It’s been a bit of a slow day, but not too boring.”

“I should hope not! Boring days are the worst days,” the Doctor announced. “Did you know that the first shops ever were back in the Middle Ages? Ancient Rome, I think. Although it was pretty boring back then, so probably not your kind of thing. Not much around. Although, back in the mid-nineteenth century, Aristide Beaucicaut invented the first-ever department store in Paris! Now that was fun,” she grinned. "Although there were quite a lot of people stealing stuff, which probably isn't your thing."

“Are you going to buy anything today?” Abby asked uncertainly. The Doctor’s behaviour was probably more energetic than every customer she’d had for the past month put together, Yaz thought glumly.

The Doctor let go of Abby’s hand. “Yes I am!” She said, splaying her hands out to gesture at the large trolley behind her that was covered in stuff. Abby eyed the trolley, and spent several minutes scanning everything and answering all the Doctor’s questions (of which there were many) with monosyllabic answers like “Yes”, “No,” and the eloquent go-to, “Mmm-hmm”. 

“How would you like to pay?” Abby asked when they were finally done. “Cash or card?”

“Card,” the Doctor replied breezily, rummaging through her pockets. She dug her hand up to her elbow in one of them, her hand fidgeting around until it reached a rectangular piece of plastic. “Ah! Gotcha,” she said triumphantly, whipping out a golden card and presenting it as if it were a trophy. 

Abby took the card warily and swiped it. “Could you please put in your PIN number - wait, hold on, it’s saying that you... don’t need one?” She trailed off like it was a question. 

The Doctor beamed. “It’s supposed to do that.”

“Do you want a receipt?” Abby asked. 

“Nah, thanks!” The Doctor strode out of the store, with Ryan, Yaz and Graham hot on her heels. Somehow, much to his chagrin, Graham had ended up carrying the bloody trolley with all the stuff on it. He thought one of the benefits of being older than everyone else was that they'd offer to carry heavy stuff for him. Apparently, even though the other three were all perfectly sprightly, chivalry had gone and died. Graham glared at the furniture like if he did it hard enough it would light up on fire. 

“What did you do, Doc?” Graham asked as he parked the trolley outside the TARDIS and everyone started to haul the chairs and everything else in, one by one. Graham had a silent conversation with Ryan, elbowing him in the stomach and nodding to the furniture. Ryan held his gaze for a few seconds, before sighing and taking the lovely, plush armchair that Graham had picked out. 

“Oh, nothing much, really. I have this nifty little card from an old friend,” the Doctor wiggled the golden card, “and it has an infinite amount of credits on it. Available for purchases on any planet with a functioning currency.” 

“Any planet with a- ?” Graham’s eyes widened up in shock. “Bloody hell, Doc,” he whispered, staring at the card that could fit in his pocket.

“That’s wicked and all,” Ryan wheezed from behind Graham’s armchair, “But do you think you could give us a hand?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys! jeez, i have not updated in a while. sorry, i meant to get round to it, but i was pretty busy and lost track of time. I'll try to post the next chapter in a couple of days. please kudos/comment if you like the chapter :)  
> p.s. seventy-eight aisles is not that many. hardware stores are a frigging maze. i went to a big one about a week ago and there were more than ninety aisles on two floors. it was flabbergasting.  
> p.p.s. do home and hardware stores even exist, or is it just one or the other? no idea. just go with it, they're on an alien planet in the somethingth century (probably the future, which is why the cashier lady is human). i raaaarely go shopping, so if something sounds weird or improbable, just go with it. also, gazania seeds are a thing, and that will come up later (if i can remember it).


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> back to the present, where yaz's just got back from her narrow escape w/ the silurians. thasmin!!! (and uno)

Yaz woke up feeling extremely warm and comfortable. She could feel blankets around her, and also something nearby. She opened her eyes to see a pristine white room and the Doctor in front of her, sleeping softly and occasionally making small noises. It was like she was talking to herself in her sleep. Yaz looked at her fondly, taking in all the details on the Doctor’s face. There were little bags under her eyes that weren’t visible unless she actually focussed on them, and her chest rose and fell erratically. Yaz assumed that was something to do with the two hearts. She didn’t understand why the Time Lords needed two hearts. Did they need more oxygen pumping around in their blood? Probably not. Did they have a consistent need to feel more superior than everyone else around them? Knowing what she knew from her experience with the Doctor and the Master, that seemed to be the case. The Doctor loved showing off. In a nice way, though. Like, she didn’t really notice that she was doing it when she was going off on a tangent about her twenty-seven brains and name-dropping every person she could think of on the way. It was funny listening to her when she was going on about some wild party she’d had with Freddie Mercury and Aretha Franklin, or told them about another story with Albert Einstein getting into a swordfight. The Master did it in a more obnoxious way, like he knew he was brilliantly clever and was just boasting until everyone jumped up with applause. Which he was, but both he and the Doctor rubbed it in everyone else’s face. The Master was just dangling his brains in front of everyone, daring them to question him so he could immediately outsmart them. Both Time Lords seemed to get a kick out of it, so Yaz assumed that they all had a bit of a superiority complex.

Maybe that was why they talked to humans so much. The Master did it less, but he still talked to humans, if only to razzle-dazzle his clever plans before he killed them. The Doctor seemed a little bit lonely. Yaz couldn’t imagine living for thousands of years. The Doctor would have seen so much. And lost so much. To the Doctor, she and Ryan and Graham were probably just a blip, a passing compliment before moving on. She knew that the Doctor didn’t mean it, couldn’t help it, but she seemed to leave a trail of death and loss in her wake. Like with Grace. And that had been the very first time that Yaz had ever encountered anything extraterrestrial. The Doctor walked headfirst into dangerous situations without any regard for her own safety, and when the humans she met were drawn in by the daring, brilliant, clever alien that they saw, they wouldn’t have any regard for their safety either. 

The Doctor had asked them if they were sure, Yaz remembered. If they were sure that they wanted to travel with her. She had looked so old and sad when she had said that. Yaz could see the loss in her eyes. She knew that there were more before her. There might be more after her. But being with the Doctor was always living in the moment. There was no past, no future, no history or consequences. It was just now. And being with the Doctor made Yaz feel more alive than she had ever felt back on Earth. She hadn’t been lying when she said she had wanted more. She did want more. There was so much to see, and they had barely seen any of it. Yaz wanted to see as much as she could, because seeing all of the things out there felt like living life, more than just existing around the ebb and flow of schedule and regularity. It was unpredictable, exciting, addictive. Yaz loved it. 

The Doctor’s eyes fluttered open. “Hey, Yaz,” she mumbled. “Why’re you staring at me?” 

“Oh! Uh - erm, nothing,” Yaz fumbled. “There was an eyelash on your cheek,” she said, brushing an imaginary eyelash from the Doctor’s cheek. 

“Thanks,” the Doctor replied, staring back at Yaz. “I think there’s an eyelash on your cheek too.” Despite herself, Yaz’s cheeks warmed slightly as the Doctor’s slender fingers brushed at her face. The Doctor leaned forward and pressed her lips to Yaz’s forehead. Shucks, now she was definitely blushing. “Hope you feel better now,” the Doctor said sweetly. “How are you feeling?”

“Um…” Yaz’s brain short-circuited. “Alright, I guess?” She didn’t mean for her sentence to sound like a question, but it did anyway. 

“That’s good!” The Doctor said. She seemed to be getting gradually more energetic as she woke up. She stretched her arms like a cat. Yaz stared at her. “I feel loads better after that nap. Naps are so great, don’t you think?”

‘Mm-hmm,” Yaz said. 

“So what happened yesterday? Were you with the Master? I didn’t see him, where was his TARDIS? How did you get to that planet?” The Doctor revved up, entering Wholesome Interrogator Mode. 

“Well, I was in the Master’s TARDIS - I was stuck there for a while, but it was kind of alright when he wasn’t bothering me - and I managed to steer it to a random planet -”

“Nicely done, Yaz! Ten points for you!” The Doctor held her hand up. Yaz high-fived it. She definitely did not blush at all. 

Yaz continued, “And it was all dusty and deserted, except I found this one girl called Marshivva in this abandoned village, and she told me she was a Selarian or something -”

“Silurian?” The Doctor asked. 

“Yeah, that was it,” Yaz confirmed. 

“But the Silurians are from Earth. They were here millions of years ago, and they hibernated underneath because they thought that the Moon was gonna destroy Earth and then it didn’t and - _oh_ , you must’ve seen a colony ship! Wow, that’s so cool,” the Doctor said. 

“Marshivva said it was the seventh century,” Yaz said uncertainly. 

“Pfft! Seventh century may as well have meant seventeen million years BCE for all you knew,” the Doctor said, although it didn’t sound like an insult. 

“Okay. So, Marshivva was all by herself in this really dark room and I was trying to run away from the Master before he figured out that I’d steered the TARDIS to this planet, which was why you couldn’t see his TARDIS, it was pretty far away from where I’d gotten to, and Marshivva told me about this group of other aliens called the Prodaks or something that had captured her race, but she’d escaped, and -”

“Woah! The Prodaks! They were legendary. Hold on, I think I remember something about them. Some myth about the Silurians -” The Doctor faltered at the flat look on Yaz’s face. “Sorry, go on.”

“Well, Marshivva told me that she had escaped before they could find her and catch her, but she was staying inside the house because they couldn’t smell her, and she only let me in after I basically begged her because she didn’t want them to smell us and catch her. Except she was building this bomb - oh, don’t look so reproachful, Doctor, I wasn’t the one building it - and she had programmed it so that it would kill all of the Prodaks without even scratching the Silurians, ‘cause it was for warm-blooded people only, and then I told her that I was warm blooded and, well, she kicked me out of the house,” Yaz shrugged. 

The Doctor gasped. “She did not! That’s so rude!”

“Yep. Except she was going to use the bomb anyway, so she used me as bait to lure the Prodaks to the village where she was camping out so that she could kill them all, because she had basically finished building the bomb anyway, except that’s when you came in with your TARDIS!” Yaz finished, taking a deep breath. 

“Hold on,” the Doctor said, putting on her thinking face when she had an idea or remembered something important. “I know something about that… can’t remember what, but there were myths about the Silurians and the Prodaks, way back, let me think,” she stopped talking and cupped her chin with her hand, “Oh yes! I remember now! Marshivva Neera, famous for saving her race!”

“So it worked? She saved the rest of the Silurians?” Yaz asked. She felt pretty resentful towards Marshivva, understandably, but she had to admit she still wanted the Silurians to live, even if it might have come at the cost of her life. She was just one human, after all, and they were an entire alien race. When she thought it like that, the answer sounded obvious. Still, she was extremely glad that the Doctor had stopped her from being forced to make that choice.

“Yes! She was, like, the Silurian’s most famous ancestor! Wow, that must’ve been way back in the past! And I think she might’ve mentioned you,” the Doctor said, puzzled. 

“Really?”

“Yeah, there was a Yaz or something mentioned in the legends, except it was kinda vague and none of the historians understood what had happened or who Yaz was, so they dismissed it as false evidence,” the Doctor finished. 

“Oh. Well, at least I was there,” Yaz shrugged. “I’ve never been involved in legends before.”

“Oh my goodness. Yasmin Khan, what a day you’ve had,” the Doctor puffed out. “At least I was there!”

Yaz smiled. “I’m glad you were there, Doctor. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here right now.” She looked down and remembered what she had found out on the Master’s TARDIS, her shoulders stiffening as she remembered that the alien next to her wasn’t who she thought she was. “Doctor?”

“Yeah, Yaz?”

“When I was on the TARDIS - the Master’s TARDIS, I mean… he told me things. Stuff about you, I mean.” 

The Doctor tensed. “What kind of stuff?” She asked cautiously. 

“He told me about the Time War,” Yaz said, looking up at her with a plea in her eyes for forgiveness and maybe an explanation. 

The Doctor sighed. “Of course he did. I’m sorry you had to hear about that, Yaz.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Yaz asked.

“It was the same with the Master destroying Gallifrey. I was afraid,” the Doctor replied, looking into her eyes sadly. She looked so old. 

Yaz took her hand, damn the consequences. The Doctor may have been a Time Lord, one of the most amazing people Yaz had ever met, but she still thought that the Doctor just needed a bit of comforting every now and then. The Doctor’s hand tightened around hers, and she looked at her gratefully. The Doctor still felt things too, Yaz thought. She still did bad things. She still made mistakes, and she was flawed, and she did the wrong things sometimes. But to err was human. 

“The Time War was the war to end all wars,” the Doctor said quietly, so quietly that at first Yaz thought she’d just imagined her talking. “It was the most destructive thing that had ever been seen in history - the Time Lords and the Daleks.”

“I knew about that bit,” Yaz said, squeezing her hand in encouragement. The Doctor’s hand was unbelievably warm. 

“It was waged on Gallifrey, mainly, but you’ve got to imagine - the fleets of Time Lords and Daleks were endless, and both sides had seemingly endless supplies of weapons and the will to destroy - nobody was ever going to win,” the Doctor said, her eyes downcast. “It was waged for years, decades, centuries, I don’t even know how long. It was so big, and it went on forever, and it would never had stopped if I didn’t do anything. When I was younger, much younger than I am now, I stopped it. I stopped it using the Moment, the only weapon that the Time Lords hadn’t used, because it killed planets. It wiped out all the life on Gallifrey like that,” the Doctor punctuated her sentence by snapping her fingers. 

“Then how did the Master destroy it again, if there was nobody left?” Yaz asked. 

“I used the Moment, and it showed me what would happen. When I was much, much older, and I had had hundreds of years to think about it, I was given another chance to change my past. I didn’t want to do it anymore. So I changed history, and I put Gallifrey in a pocket universe so that the Dalek troops would destroy each other and it would seem like the same result had happened. Except I didn’t really remember it…”

“Why not?” 

The Doctor struggled to explain. “I was with myself - well, two of my other selves - well, all of them at one point, except they were all in their TARDISes and it was all very complicated - and time is just a big ball of wibbly-wobbly stuff, you know?”

Yaz did not know at all. 

“Anyway, I accidentally crossed my own personal timeline, got married to Queen Elizabeth, then attended my own wedding to Queen Elizabeth, long story, not that I really wanted to, except I thought she was a Zygon and then I thought the Zygon was a rabbit - sorry, I’m getting off track - anyway, I messed up time a lot, and time doesn’t like it very much when you mess it up a lot, it’s a bit like a whiny toddler with a dirty nappy, and so I didn’t really remember any of it, except then later I figured it out and I did, and long story short, I thought I destroyed my planet when I was young, except then I got older and changed my personal history, and then I didn’t remember it, and then a gazillion years later (well, not a gazillion, I’m rounding up), the Master destroyed Gallifrey. Again. That one wasn’t my fault, it was just him.” The Doctor sat on the bed, panting after talking for so long. 

Yaz stayed very still, trying to digest all of that. “You married Queen Elizabeth?” She asked faintly. 

“Well, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident - one time one of the King Henrys proposed to my friend and there was a lot of problems with that - and I didn’t really hang around for long, which is why Queen Bess hates my guts. There was a whole thing with Shakespeare and werewolves - wait, no, that was Vicky -”

“Queen Victoria?” Yaz clarified. 

“That’s the one! She didn’t like me much either, except it was a right laugh trying to get her to chuckle just once, she was really stuffy, and -”

“Oh my goodness, Doctor, shut up,” Yaz said. 

“Right, yeah, sorry,” the Doctor said. She scratched her forehead. “So… did all that make sense?” She asked. 

“Just barely, but I s’pose that’s enough. So you... didn’t kill your whole race?” She wondered if there was a less awkward way to ask that. 

“Nope,” the Doctor said. “Except they’re all dead now anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter much,” she said dejectedly. Yaz squeezed her hand again. 

They sat in silence for a few monumentally awkward seconds looking at each other, before the Doctor jumped up and said “Tea! The tea’s cold. We left it on the nightstand,” she said, gesturing to the two mugs on the nightstand. “D’you want tea? I’ll warm it up in the microwave,” she said, grabbing the mugs and taking a sip out of one so there was less in it to spill over as she walked very fast out the door. 

Yaz jogged to keep up with her, missing the warmth of her hand. The Doctor’s hands were super warm. “When did we get a microwave?” She asked. She didn’t try to press the Doctor about Gallifrey. It seemed that that particular topic of conversation had been pushed firmly shut, and the Doctor did not look like she was in the mood for talking about it. Yaz absentmindedly wondered whether there was some special alien therapist that she could get for the Doctor.

“Oh, it was ages ago. It’s yellow! You’ll love it,” the Doctor said confidently. 

The Doctor sped-walked to the kitchen, opening a microwave that Yaz had never seen before in her life (it was golden yellow with tiny pink roses) and somehow managing to press the buttons with her sock-covered feet, rather than putting the mugs down on the kitchen counter and doing it with her hands. Her feet seemed to be pretty flexible (Yaz did not want to think about that), so when she programmed a minute into it, it looked easy. The Doctor haphazardly swung the mugs into the microwave, closed it with her foot, and jumped onto the kitchen counter in one fluid movement. She patted the spot next to her. “Come up here, Yaz. You’ll feel so much taller.”

“I am tall, thank you very much,” Yaz replied, a bit miffed. 

“I’m pretty sure you’re shorter than me,” the Doctor chuckled. 

“I can use my tippy-toes if I really need to be tall, you know. For all those... high shelves.”

“What high shelves? I don’t think we have any of ‘em in the TARDIS,” the Doctor said. 

“You know what I mean,” Yaz said. 

The microwave dinged. 

“Oh!” The Doctor said, jumping down from the counter. “Tea’s ready!”

The Doctor handed one of the cups to Yaz and downed half of her own in a single gulp. “Come on, let’s see what Graham and Ryan are up to!”

Graham and Ryan, it seemed, were up to a lot. Seeing as they didn’t have a referee or a mediator, the chess game had gotten fiercely competitive and there had been a lot of shouting. 

“It is not a stalemate!” Graham yelled. “You cheated!”

“I did not cheat! I was playing perfectly well, you just weren’t paying attention!”

“Oh, I’ll show you who’s paying attention,” Graham said threateningly, rolling his sleeves up to his elbows and leaning over the table, “Knight to G4.”

Ryan stared, open-mouthed, at the board. “You can’t do that!”

“I can, son, and I just did,” Graham said smugly. 

“Hey, guys!” The Doctor greeted, coming into the games room with Yaz. “How’s it going?”

“Let me guess, both of you are certain that the other one’s cheating,” Yaz smirked. 

They frowned. “No,” Graham said.

“Yes,” Ryan admitted. 

“Do you even know the rules?” The Doctor asked. 

“Of course we know the rules,” Graham aggressively pointed at a small pamphlet labelled ‘Chess Instructions’. “If we didn’t know the rules, one of us’d riot.”

“Probably both,” Ryan said. 

“Can’t you try a different game?” Yaz suggested. “One where you’re not so competitive?”

The other three looked at her flatly. “They’ve been playing this game for almost a week now,” the Doctor said sadly. “It’s too late for them.”

Graham huffed. “Fine, if it stops you two banging on about it.”

Five minutes later, everyone had settled down to play Uno. The Doctor had finished her cup of tea, so Yaz had given her the rest of it. But Graham and Ryan were no longer the only ones yelling; Yaz and the Doctor turned out to be insanely competitive. 

“SNAP!” The Doctor bellowed, slamming a card down on the table. “Oh wait, Uno. Darn, I’ve done it again.”

“Plus four,” Yaz grinned, putting a plus four card down.

“Plus another four,” Ryan said, matching Yaz’s expression. 

“Add another one of those, mate,” Graham said, sliding another card onto the table. 

The Doctor’s expression fell. The other three grimaced at her. “Sorry Doc,” Ryan said. “We don’t make the rules.”

“Plus twelve! That’s ridiculous!” The Doctor protested. 

“It’s not actually that bad,” Yaz said. “Once when I played Uno with Mum and Sonya, I had to pick up twenty-four cards in one go.” 

The Doctor winced. “Alright, that sounds worse. Fine, I’ll take them,” she grumbled as she counted out twelve cards, “But watch out, you lot, because there’s no way I can get twelve bad cards -” She went silent for a second, and then groaned loudly at the ceiling. “Twelve bad cards! Are you kidding me! Guys, I reckon the TARDIS has been having me on.”

“I don’t think the TARDIS has been shuffling the cards to make you lose,” Ryan said. 

“But _twelve bad cards_?! That’s fourteen too many,” the Doctor said. 

“Here, you can have one of my good cards,” Graham said. “I’ll swap you.”

The Doctor lit up. “Really, Graham? Oh, that’s so nice of you!” She passed him a three, and he gave her a colour-changer. “Yes!” The Doctor punched the air. She smacked the card on the table. “I change the colour to… yellow!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops i updated late but i have a genuine excuse this time: i was on the verge of death by bottomless canyon. not kidding, although it was less dramatic than it sounds cos there were fences and stuff, but there was no internet in the mountains and i couldn't read any fanfics :(((( but at least if i had fallen over and disappeared into the dark bottomless pit it would have been dramatic and swoon-worthy, which is how i always wanted to go out. anyway here's the next chapter!


	13. Chapter 13

The Master idly wondered where Yaz was as he sipped some sherry. He hadn’t seen her for a while. Not that he was worrying, but she did have rather shoddy self-preservation skills and if she had come across some alien subspecies within his TARDIS somewhere and gotten offed by it, it wasn’t his fault. Since their last wonderful chat, he had mainly been taste-testing human alcohol and assessing which was best. He hadn’t done much of it before; he liked a few drinks from other galaxies that didn’t contain alcohol but did contain… other things. Suffice to say, he had not been fully conscious for a while, nor had his brain been properly functioning for the same length of time. He thought it was perfectly reasonable. He was in mourning, after all. Or something like that.

He felt some small degree of responsibility, though. After all, he had kidnapped her. If she was dead as a result, the Doctor would have his head. And he had almost gotten just a tiny bit (dare he say) used to having her annoying presence around. She had probably found the pit of spiders in the pseudo-basement and decided to jump right in. The Master got up, placing down the sherry glass and ambling over to the TARDIS console, placing his hands delicately upon the Gallifreyan symbols and idly tracing them with the fingers on his left hand while he used the right hand to type. He was ambidextrous, which had served him well in the course of his lifetime (and had also been very useful for duels), and he used the TARDIS’s database to scan for human life signs on the ship. 

_No human life signs found_. 

The text on the screen glowed as the Master faltered. What? No human life signs? That wasn’t possible. He refreshed the screen, glaring at it when the same message showed. _She can’t have - oh, shit_. 

The Master ran to the TARDIS doors, flinging them open and staring at a dry, dusty wasteland. He could see something in the distance, though. His sight was very good. Better than a human’s. It looked like masses of something on the ground. He could see a lot of spikes, too. It was kilometres away, though. The Master went back inside the TARDIS, swearing more as he did so, and moved the TARDIS so it was just a few kilometres northeast, where he had seen the masses of unidentifiable things. He opened the door again, momentarily startled at the overwhelming number of bodies in front of him, all collapsed and all adorned with weapons. They were dead. He could tell. That was a lot of dead people. None of them were human, or even resembling human. They had the same body shape, give or take a couple of limbs, and their skin was a light shade of maroon, stretching across their gaunt faces and bones like they had never been properly fed in years. Prodaks. 

The Master had never run into them, although he had never ran into any hostile warrior species if he could help it. They didn’t die easily. He breathed in through his mouth, tasting the air on his tongue. Silurians. Somewhere. Bugger. They were still alive. It had clearly been an attack, and if the Prodaks had lost - well, they didn’t lose easily, and it meant that the Silurians had probably used some clever tech in their stuck-up, pacifist ways so it had killed the Prodaks. Which probably meant that Yaz was dead, after taking his bloody TARDIS and steering it millions of years in the past, when the Silurians had barely colonised Earth yet and they were invaded by the bloody Prodaks. Of course Yaz had had enough good luck to land on her own planet, but enough bad luck to do so hundreds of millions of years before there was any human life on it. Oh, bollocks. 

He had not planned to end up with the Doctor’s dead companion on his hands. She wasn’t even on his hands. He didn’t have her stupid body. In the Doctor’s books, that would be even worse. He couldn’t remember killing any of her companions before. Oh wait, nevermind. But they hadn’t been his favourites. His favourites had been ones like Clara, whose reactions were so funny when he had threatened to kill her numerous times. Osgood had been so fun to play with, though. Martha and her family weren't much of a laugh, but he doubted that they had been having a good time. He did like Bill ever so slightly, but Nardole had been an absolute buzzkill. He hadn’t killed him back when he was a woman. He regretted it deeply. Nardole had been a bloody nuisance. 

The Master closed the door with a bang, skulking back to the console and flexing his knuckles. Bother, bother, bother. He did not sign up for this. He gave it a go on the TARDIS anyway, scanning for human life signs on this planet. 

_No human life signs detected._

He sighed. Recently dead, then.

 _No recently deceased human signs detected_.

He blinked at the screen. Well, that was just downright rude. He tried it again. 

_No recently deceased human signs detected_.

The Master stared at the screen incredulously. If Yaz wasn’t dead on this planet, and she _definitely_ wasn’t alive, then - 

Oh, shit. Oh, bother. Bloody hell. Not her. 

Yaz had to be somewhere else. Not on this planet, whose primitive tech would never support intergalactic travel for several thousand years yet. No, she was picked up by the one other person in the universe with a TARDIS, the one person who he had been avoiding. The Doctor. 

~~~

The Doctor held a mug to her lips, splayed on the sofa with Yaz, Ryan and Graham as they watched Jaws. They had been on a trip that day to seventeenth-century France, where everyone had gotten croissants and then been almost killed for not wearing patriotic clothes, but the Doctor had used her exceptional bargaining skills and gotten them out of trouble (well, it had also been Bastille Day, so there was a lot of stuff going on and everyone was a bit too busy to notice five British people wiggling out of prison, but it had mainly been the Doctor’s excellent negotiating skills). When they had got back, after popping over to Sri Lanka for lunch, which had been bloody delicious, if she did say so herself, Ryan had suggested watching a movie. The Doctor wasn’t very good with all of the recent films and music and pop culture (she was struggling as it was with the slang) and so she had been all for it. Ryan had suggested Jaws, and they had, for a while, been at a voting standstill because Yaz and Graham didn’t want to watch a scary movie, except Ryan had threatened Yaz with showing everyone some photos of her and the Doctor, and then Yaz had gotten all pink and flustered - that was the only bit the Doctor couldn’t make head nor tail of, but she was already putting the kettle on and grabbing popcorn - so Yaz had given in, and Graham had whinged for a while but he had caved in too because Ryan kept banging on about “democracy” and “this is a majority vote! You got outvoted, Gramps, you can’t get huffy at the rules now!” so Graham had stopped just so Ryan would stop nagging him. 

They had barely gotten past the first five minutes when Yaz started whimpering because it was scary, and the Doctor wrapped one arm around her to make her feel better, which seemed to do the trick. Yaz hadn’t said anything for the past ten minutes. The Doctor had been hoarding popcorn in the pantry for quite a while, since she had been so busy doing - well, everything - and hadn’t had time to watch movies, or friends to watch it with. Even with Bill, she had only seen a couple of films, and those were just the ones that Bill had assured her would get her “down with the kids”. Her last regeneration hadn’t been very big on movies. BUt the Doctor found that she quite liked shouting at all the scary bits. Horror movies were cool. Actually, she had meant to watch the film adaptation of Frankenstein ever since they had met the Shelleys at Lake Geneva, but she had been preoccupied. She wasn’t even sure if there was a film adaptation of Frankenstein. If there wasn’t, she could just make one! That cheered the Doctor up as the shark ripped off someone’s limbs and left a bunch of blood in the water. 

Yaz screamed. “It’s alright, Yaz,” the Doctor reassured her as the music swelled ominously and everyone on the beach noticed what was going on and started getting all the kids out of the water. “It’s just a shark, and sharks are actually pretty friendly! I met a shark once,” she said. “Its name was Jeffrey. Well, it wasn’t called Jeffrey, but it didn’t have a name, so I called it Jeffrey. Jeffrey was a lemon shark, though. They’re pescetarians, very pleasant to swim around with. And they’re yellow! Isn’t that great?”

“Stop talking,” Ryan complained. “You’re ruining the movie.”

“Sorry,” the Doctor said, except she wasn’t that sorry because Yaz looked a lot less scared now that she was probably picturing the Doctor in swimmers with a yellow shark called Jeffrey. Jeffrey hadn’t been that yellow, but he was a lot more yellow than the rest of the sharks. The Doctor had been partial to seahorses. It was her eleventh regeneration, the young flappy one, and there had been an awfully long period of time when she had been swimming around in the Pacific with seahorses. She had avoided dolphins, though. Dolphins were unbelievably annoying sometimes, and they were horrible to pufferfish. 

“Why did Chrissie go skinny-dipping?” The Doctor asked. “Wouldn’t it be too cold for that? Anyway, why did that other bloke just pass out? I reckon he’s got a low alcohol tolerance. Probably shouldn’t be drinking,” she said to Yaz. 

“That mayor seems to be awfully dense,” she said five minutes later. “Doesn’t he care about everyone’s safety?”

“No,” Graham said. “He’s an American capitalist, he only cares about money.”

“And probably chips,” Ryan added. 

“Everyone loves chips, though,” Yaz said. “Chips are the best.”

Later, when the movie had finished and everyone was successfully scared out of their wits (except the Doctor, because she had seen far too many scary things in real life to be afraid of a mere shark prop in a horror movie), the Doctor dropped everyone off at their respective houses to go to bed, because Yaz was feeling homesick and wanted to see her mum and sister, and Graham and Ryan wanted a little bit of peace and quiet where they didn’t have a chess game to fight over. Also, Ryan apparently had basketball practice in the morning and since he’d been skiving off he didn’t want Tibo to think he was being a pillock. 

The Doctor stayed in the TARDIS for a while after everyone had left, before she moved the ship to just nearby the Helix Nebula. She opened the doors and sat down, swinging her legs out so that they dangled just above the endless black chasm. It looked like a giant eye, shining bluish-gold with a deep red tint outlining it. She had been inside, but it was nicer to just look from outside sometimes. It was teeming with life, she knew. Billions upon billions of people and creatures and plants and life, and they would never stop. The center of the nebula, the giant clear blue pupil, looked like it was gazing into her soul. She liked stuff like that. The eye was all-seeing and knowing; full of life, but from where she was sitting, legs spilling over the edge like a schoolgirl on the bench, she could sit and imagine things bigger than her, gazing into the massive eye. It gave her a little bit of hope. And faith. She hated feeling like the biggest, like the most powerful of them all. If she was a Time Lord, and the Timeless Child, and the last one left who seemed to care about doing any good for the universe, then why did she feel so small? How could someone so big look upon something like the Helix Nebula, so much bigger, so much more infinite, and feel small? It made her feel like maybe she wasn’t the biggest, the highest, the most powerful. She didn’t want to be a god. She just wanted to be a traveller. To help people. To be a doctor.

 _Contact_.

The Doctor startled awake, sweat causing her hair to stick to her face as she raced to assess the situation. 

_Contact_. There it was again, a low, gravelly, utterly unwelcome voice reverberating in her head, ricocheting off the psychological walls that she had built up in her brain as defences. The Doctor checked her surroundings. Still in the TARDIS, no humans, nobody to worry about or be responsible for the death of. Good. Voice in her head which was definitely coming from the Master. Not good. Very not good. The Doctor considered her options: she could ignore him. That probably wouldn’t turn out well. The last time she ignored the Master, people had paid with their lives. She could try and wriggle into his head, past his barriers, to see what his diabolical plan was. But he might react badly to that, too…

_Bloody hell, Doctor, just listen to me. Please._

It was the ‘please’ that did it. The Master never said please. The Doctor squeezed her eyes tight. 

_Contact_. 

When their minds connected, it was like a river of lava meeting a cool flow of water. Their minds wrapped around each other immediately, intertwining like wild vines, so much so that the Doctor couldn’t tell whose thoughts were whose, which emotions were hers and whether the sudden rage that appeared was coming from her or him. There was rage, and there was pain, and there was a desire for them to just be together. Just friends, just like the old days. The good days. The Doctor could feel that one clearly, and she could tell that it was mutual. The shared pain of their pasts had grown from a mild breeze into a raging inferno, with both of them at the heart of it, revelling in the destruction of one another. Thousands of years that they had spent, the last ones left, best friends, best lovers, best enemies. And the worst of all that, too. The Master and the Doctor were nothing without one another, and they knew it. All that anger and bloodshed and intense, aching grief… it all bubbled over. Sharing her mind with his felt like pressing two gaping wounds up against one another, but somehow the mingling of the blood and pain helped. The Doctor gasped as the emotions swelled up between them, crashing over like they were sitting directly beneath a waterfall. 

_Hello_. That was the Master. The emotions reduced as he regained his composure and put up more barriers, so they were only in the shallows of their minds. The Doctor copied him, locking all the doors up that contained any memories of Gallifrey. 

_Hi_. She barely speaks it, but she can tell that he has heard. He always seems to hear her. 

_What am I doing here?_

_I needed to check up on you. And your human friends._

The Doctor feels more rage coming to the surface, definitely from her. _That was Yasmin Khan. My friend. You kidnapped her, she could have died. Why would you do that?_

 _Because sometimes it isn’t enough to talk to you, or to threaten the livelihood of a million people. I needed to get close to you. You forgot about me. Or tried to_ , he accused. 

The Doctor laughs in their heads. _What, so you were trying to get my attention? By nearly killing my friend? I would never have forgiven you_ , she said viciously. _You’ve hurt so many people. You killed our race._

_Don’t get all self-righteous again, Doctor, so did you._

_But I cared! I did it to stop the destruction of the universe!_

_And I did it because they hurt you!_ The Master roars inside her head, and she can tell that he didn’t mean to say that. The Doctor stops being angry, though. The emotion cools like it’s ice, hissing and burning her. 

_What do you mean? You… you did it because you thought it made me better than you._

_And it does_ , he spits, _but we both know that they hurt you. They caused more pain than any singular being has ever experienced. You died a million times, Theta, because they were exploiting something they didn’t understand for their own profit._

He called her Theta. The Doctor doesn’t know what to say at that. It’s been a long time since anyone has called her by that name. A long, long time. An image flashes in her head of her, Theta, and him, Koschei, running and laughing through endless fields of red grass and sunlight. She is turning her head back to look at him, and he is looking at her with adoration and pride. It’s… it’s her memory. She shoves it down when she realises that the Master can see it too. It’s quiet. 

_Koschei_. 

He shudders at the sound of his own name spilling from her lips, a full-body shiver just at the adrenaline rush that it gives him. She can feel it too. 

She sends him coordinates.

~~~

The suns are shining on Gallifrey with the sort of brilliance that would be unimaginable to anybody who had never been there. Words could never have done Gallifrey justice. Not pictures, not video or any other form of communication. The only way that one could ever truly experience the majesty and glory of Gallifrey was to stand upon its plains, red grass nudging at one’s feet and suns glowing in one’s eyes, and gaze at the resplendence of the Gallifrey Citadel. Today, the Gallifrey Citadel was no more, its iconic sphere encasing the city smashed and destroyed like a fragile snowglobe dropped by a careless infant. It was in ruins. The bodies were scattered around like scruffy dolls pushed aside, and there were silent flames burning in the distance in the name of a rage that had since been extinguished. The suns were still shining, however, a deep, blazing orange that seemed like it would never die. It kept going. The wind kept whistling through the trees. Miniscule ferns had grown in the cracks between the rubble, invisible unless scrutinised by an observer. 

Two TARDISes landed quietly on the vast plains. Nobody was there to hear the wheezing, groaning of the forever-blue police box, and nobody was there to applaud at the effortlessly perfect landing of another TARDIS just next to it. The suns were approaching the horizon, warning the people who were no longer there to see it of its imminent farewell. Two doors swung open at the same time, and the last two Time Lords stepped out of their TARDISes: the Doctor, the Timeless Child, possibly the most powerful being to ever live, trying to heal so many and ending up hurting so many more; and the Master, rivalling the Doctor’s power and attempting to soothe his own demons with the screaming and wailing and fear and pain of others. They were both legends, and they were both nightmares, and they were both gods. But today, when the Gallifrey suns were embracing them with their warmth, the smell of ash and smoke was intruding upon both their senses, and the wind was racing in the sky over both of them, there was nobody else. It was just them. Theta and Koschei. 

Theta looked up at the sky with melancholy, as if it might give her some answers or reassurance. But the sky was neither comforting nor cruel, and it did not give her false hopes. It merely continued on. 

Koschei looked at the Citadel, the place where he had hurt so much and so many for his own pain and for that of his friend. The people were dead. The Cybermen were dead, too. It was finished. There was nothing left for him to kill, and he no longer had a reason to avenge. Theta was here with him. 

They turned to look at each other, and closed their eyes at the same time. Neither of them needed to say _Contact_. It was just there, the gentle hands reaching out for one another, finding one another in the darkness and gripping on tightly. 

_Hello, Theta._

_Hello, Koschei._ The Doctor doesn’t feel angry anymore, now. Maybe it's the feeling of standing on the soil of her home. Maybe it is being with him, not because of a battle or a negotiation or a fight. Just standing beside him. She never imagined that it would come to this. Maybe they are both lonely, and tired of fighting. 

_Why did you kidnap Yaz?_ She asks him again. Attention isn’t the entire truth. She can feel him holding something back. 

The Master hesitates before he responds. _She looked at you like you were the sun. And you looked at her like she was the moon._

The Doctor is surprised at that. She had thought of Yaz fondly, of course, maybe even a bit more than friends, but… Yaz is human. The Doctor doesn’t do humans. She couldn’t bring herself to love them even if she tried. Yaz was an amazing friend, of course, and maybe it was true that there was something there. But being with Yaz would always involve losing her eventually, because the Doctor never got to keep anyone. She had resigned herself to looking upon the human race through a clear lense, instead of the old rose-coloured one that she used to have a long time ago: one where she was allowed to help them, save them, befriend them sometimes, but never love them. She couldn’t allow that kind of emotional vulnerability with someone who would leave her in the end, whether they liked it or not. And Yaz looked at the stars with hunger in her eyes, like space was a challenge just waiting for her to complete. Rose had had that same hunger in her eyes. And look what had happened there. She could never condemn Yaz to that kind of fate, or condemn herself to that kind of loss. But Koschei is here, right now. He’s always been here, in her best times and her worst times. 

_But I wasn’t there before_ , he says bitterly into her head, resentment sewing a seed into his soul. 

_You are all I have ever known. A few more memories aren’t going to change that. You are my best friend, Koschei. I was nothing before I knew you._

_You were everything, Theta_ , he growls. _You always were, and you always have been. Compared to you, I’m just as much of a speck as your humans are.  
_  
The Doctor opens her mind. She lets down all her walls, stripped bare and vulnerable before him. She is no longer the Doctor, a name she chose to shield herself from pain. Her pain is endless, and her joy is endless, and the memories of everything she has ever known spills over like a toppled kettle, with the burning water pouring over. He embraces it. 

_Theta_. 

Koschei opens up his mind to hers. All those tiny doors, the memories crammed into boxes and kicked away, all the death and life is open to her. It feels complete. Like they were living half-lives before, always restless and unsatisfied, but here, at last, in peace. Nobody is going to win any wars on Gallifrey, or lose any battles. There is no more fighting. Their planet has seen enough blood. 

Theta doesn’t realise she’s crying until Koschei is wiping the tears from her cheeks with his thumb. She leans into him, all the grief and repressed emotions and rage at him for destroying their planet, and self-hatred for doing it first. 

_I’m sorry._ Both of them are saying it, pressing it into one another’s minds like aloe vera on their scars. The sentiment feels appropriate. 

_I forgive you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, this was supposed to be two chapters, but i realised it was really short and since it was the last chapter and i haven't updated in a while, i thought i'd finish off with a long one. here you go! this was fun to write. also, this is the first fic I've ever finished, so that's one less thing to haunt me in years to come. yay!


End file.
